JHK’s Three-Act Play, Big Slide
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
A nation in peril…
Visit the Big Slide Page to order, perform, or see sample scenes.

Ho ho ho! It’s that time of year again. Here’s JHK’s holiday classic: A Christmas Orphan.

11-year-old Jeff Greenaway hears his mom and dad argue one night after an office Christmas party. He infers from their garbled squabble that he is an orphan, found in a willow basket on the welcome mat outside their New York apartment. Thinking now that his parents are imposters, he steals away to Grand Central Station and buys a train ticket to Drakesville, Vermont, where he intends to start life all over again.Print | Kindle | Kobo (Digital) | Barnes & Noble (Digital)

I was in Buffalo, New York, over the weekend at the annual conclave of New Urbanists — a movement started in the 1990s to rescue American towns and cities. The scale of desolation of that city is not as spectacular or vast as Detroit’s, but the visible symptoms of the illness are the same. One of the events was a bicycle tour of Buffalo’s neglected East Side, where maybe 80 percent of the houses are gone and the few that remain stand amid spring wildflower meadows and the human density per acre appears too low even for successful drug-selling.

The old economy is gone and is replaced now by a “social services economy,” meaning government checks, SNAP cards, and purposelessness. There were zero signs of commerce there block after block, not even a place to buy potato chips. So, as it works out, the few remaining denizens of this place must spend half their waking hours journeying to a food store. How they make that journey is hard to tell. There were almost no cars anywhere nor buses to be seen. Before long surely the people will all be gone, too, ending a chapter in American urban history.

At one edge of the East Side neighborhood stood the hulking, gigantic remnants of the Larkin soap company, a haunted brick behemoth plangent with silence, ailanthus trees sprouting from the parapets and birds nesting in the gigantic, rusted ventilation fans. The administration building of this deeply paternalistic company was famously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, completed in 1906, and demolished in 1950 — a blink of an eye. It is considered the architect’s lost masterpiece. The site became a parking lot and now is just an empty asphalt pad with mulleins and sumacs spiking up in the pavement.

At its height of success a hundred years ago, the Larkin Company provided a stupendous bounty of social support services for its 4,500 employees: a dental office at nominal prices, dedicated rooms at local hospitals, an on-premises branch of the city library, subsidized night school classes, gyms, lounges, sports clubs, a credit union, insurance plans, and more. The people could ride streetcars all over the “Electric City,” as Buffalo styled itself because of its fortunate proximity to the bonanza of hydro power from Niagara Falls.

A hundred years ago, Buffalo was widely regarded as the city of the future. The boon of electrification made it the Silicon Valley of its day. It was among the top ten US cities in population and wealth. It’s steel industry was second to Pittsburgh and for a while it was second to Detroit in cars. Now, nobody seems to know what Buffalo might become, if anything. It will be especially interesting when the suburban matrix around it enters its own inevitable cycle of abandonment.

I’m convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century. On this bike tour the other day, I rode awhile beside a woman who spends all her spare time photographing industrial ruins. She was serenely adamant that the world will never see anything like that era and its artifacts again. I tend to agree. We cannot grok the stupendous specialness of the past century, and certainly not the fact that it is bygone for good.

When people use the term “post-industrial” these days, they don’t really mean it, and, more mysteriously, they don’t know that they don’t mean it. They expect complex, organized, high-powered industry to still be here, only in a new form. They almost always seem to imply (or so I infer) that we can remain “modern” by moving beyond the old smoke and clanking machinery into a nirvana of computer-printed reality. I doubt that we can maintain the complex supply chains of our dwindling material resources and run all those computer operations — even if we can still manage to get some electricity from Niagara Falls.

In my forthcoming novel A History of the Future (third installment of the World Made By Hand series), two of my characters journey to Buffalo a couple of decades from now. They find a town with its back turned to abandoned monuments of the industrial age. All the action is on the Lake Erie waterfront where trade is conducted by sailing ships at the scale of Sixteenth century, but with an identifiable American gloss. I’d be surprised if one in a thousand educated people in this country (including the New Urbanists) can take that vision seriously. But do you suppose that the executives of an enterprise like the Larkin Company in 1915 would have ever imagined the desolation of Buffalo a mere 99 years later?

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

I doubt it. OJ was always more attached to California than to Buffalo and committed his criminal acts in Sun Belt states (California, Nevada, and Florida). His depravity is a much a symptom of their sprawl-based economy and the values that spawned it as it is his own pathology. As a UCLA alum, I’d hope his bad karma would come back to haunt USC. Somehow, that hasn’t happened. Darn.

Now to our host’s post.

“I’m convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century”

In my classes, I spend a good chunk of a lecture on the roles of Great Lakes cities. It was pretty natural that North America’s manufacturing would be centered on the Great Lakes, as all of the natural resources required for making things out of steel were there–iron ore, coal, and lime–and the entire region was connected by a vast natural waterway, making shipping cheap. All that was needed to make cars was imported rubber. Detroit ended up with the distinction because of its central location, skilled manufacturing work force, and money looking for something to invest in once the timber boom ended. Now that cars are winding down, the city is looking for something else to make. Urban farming and trade with Canada aren’t enough to support a metropolitan population of four million.

It also helped that all the rest of the Great Lakes cities had something else to do already. Buffalo is a trade center between New York and the Great Lakes to the west. I suppose the Erie Canal might get revived as a functioning trade route in the post-petroleum future. Cleveland was the original oil capital and secondary manufacturing center. Now, it’s trying to become a tourist attraction. I’m not sure what it will do in a future without mass tourism. Toledo is the Glass City, which means its a subsidiary of Detroit. It’s still a trade center where the Maumee enters Lake Erie, but the rest of its future depends on what Detroit does.

As for the cities to the west, Chicago is the ultimate trade center, where the raw materials of the west get sent to the manufacturing centers of the east and the manufactured goods get sent to the west with Chicago profiting as the middleman (think Chicago Board of Trade). There will still be room for such a role in the future, even if it’s smaller. Milwaukee is the place where milk and grain become beer and cheese. Again, that’s useful, but how much of a mass market will there be for it?

All of the above is a story I tell my students that helps them understand their place in the world. Now they have to help create their own story so that they can keep a place in the world.

I’ll repost that to my blog in a more refined form later. Right now, the most on-topic item I have for this week is an entry documenting the conversations Fabius Maximus and I had about Kunstler’s and FM’s shared contention that Americans don’t like what America has become and are less likely to defend it.

Also, what modern societies are doing to preserve the monuments and ruins of previous fallen civilizations, Cleopatra’s Needle in New York City and the Colosseum in Rome. May the ruins of our civilization stand up to time so well and future cultures take as good care of them.

Detroit was planned for a population of 8 million. It seems to have been re-planned for 1/2 million (Mr. Orr is there to facilitate that ;).

The current plan calls for a preserved historical-landmark studded hub, hugged by upscale neighborhoods with belts of mid-market housing radiating outward and new greenbelts created over demolished housing detritus.

Underpinning this there’s supposed to be a very active ‘hi-tech’ sector headquartered there (tech billionaires don’t donate a billion+ dollars for the fun of it, no matter how scrupulous their corporations are).

The only teensy-weentsy problem with that is that growth prospects for the NASDAQ’s front-runners got clipped by the Snowden Disclosures [*]. This required damage-control and repositioning… And this is that sticky little part of the real world, where overseas reaction impacts domestic audiences.**

— — —

[*] This will kick the timing of Detroit’s Urban ‘Pivot’ into the crapper… And may give some of the less fortunate denizens a little more time to scramble out of the way.

It is appropo that you used a coming of age novel title “That was Then, This is Now,” as the title of your essay, because that is essentially what needs to happen in America. America needs to grow up. Unfortunately America as a country is heading for the old folks home. Talk about lousy timing. I for one have given up talking about the changes coming. Nobody wants to hear it. We are all Cassandras, unheeded prophets, doomed to rail against the evils of our society to empty bleachers and unwatched youtube videos. Most Americans live in a dream world and like it that way.

I am with you there, seawolf77; nobody wants to hear it. What ‘they’ want to hear is for us, like them, to regurgitate, or at least agree with the recovery lie; to get onboard with the ‘concentual halucination’ (Wolf Ritcher) of the…*ahem*…soaring Stock Market.
So….unless I am pressed, I simply nod or utter some questioning utterance, like “hmmm…” when I hear the lies discussed by sheeple. For we know, that the dichotomy of our time is that 1% of the population owns 99% of the wealth, but 99% of the population would much rather hear comforting lies as opposed to uncomforatble truth.
I am actively preparing my bug out bag with the overarching goal to be prepared both mentally and physically to leave for three days or forever, on foot most likely, depending on what happens when the unwitting 99% realize that they have been hoodwinked; the ‘portfolios’ rendered worthless, no comfy retirements await them, and prospects for future wealth accumulation do not exist. That is when the SHTF.

If I had known you were going to be in Buffalo for CNU, I would have offered you a different sort of East Side tour of urban agriculture and community resiliency projects by collapse-minded folks. There is a lot going on here that flies below the radar of the primarily aesthetically-minded new urbanism acolytes.

I can assure you that what’s happening in Buffalo with urban farming was represented on the tour, by design. We stopped at the Wilson Street Urban Farm – last stop on the tour – and spent time with Mark & Janice. The gritty archipelago and community of hope that’s emerging on the city’s East Side IS transforming neighborhoods and the people who live here.

New Urbanists are as concerned with things like economics, food systems, transportation, and social justice as with aesthetics. CNU is a generalist, wholistic movement, which you’d already know if you’d kept one eye open in class.

My hometown, Watertown, NY, manifests the same sclerotic symptoms as Buffalo on a smaller scale, but with a militaristic element in the mix with Fort Drum propping up what’s left of the local economy. I lived in Malone, NY, for 33 years when I taught up there on the Quebec border, and that moribund village suffered the loss of Wolverine shoe manufacturing, a dress factory and most other useful and productive industry in the past few decades. Retiring to Albemarle, NC, took me to a Southern clime not unlike my northernmost NY roots, with mills all shut down, and little left for folks to do apart from the fields of health care and education, which aren’t much to rave about either. Now I find myself in Raleigh, with the Beltline and the I-40 serving up the last vestiges of the car culture craziness, while the economy here appears to be considerably more steady (hinging always and precariously on the American delusion of constant growth and expansion). Someday
I may return to the Great Lakes region (including Lake Champlain), if the South decides to rise again amidst its latest fall, and if it seems right to “get back to where I once belonged.”

And remember, the South should rise again. Local power is the way of the future. You may not like the form it takes, but that’s their decision and not yours as an outsider. Recognizing something as good or necessary even when it’s bad for one personally is the mark and test of maturity.

The true Southern Patriots can’t stand that they’ve been inundated by Northern Carpetbaggers. I’m in the same boat as you btw. I’m a Northerner and have no place there. The South won the long term Culture War in the Red States btw. Go to the rural West and you will see.

I’ve long thought that “The War of Northern Aggression” was won by the south in 1877, when the Republican Party of the day decided they liked the Presidency more than their old Principles. The civil rights fight of the fifties and sixties was but an insurrection, and you don’t even have to go to the rural West – try out suburban Michigan, or rural New York, or eastern Washington State (heck, Seattle decided to gut their Mass Transit, probably because of the fear of blacks finding jobs…)

Actually, that vision is not too hard to imagine. But we may well be fortunate if it all does reconsolidate at 16th century levels. With the rapidly increasing erratic nature of the climate and weather patterns, and the truly scary data now coming in from that front, the great lakes might be frozen over or dried up before those sailing vessels ever get built.

Jim, I hope your tour of the east side of Buffalo included a drive-by of Central Terminal — owned by some nonprofit and in a state or near-collapse. At one time it handled perhaps over 100 passenger trains a day and tens of thousands of passengers. It had 26 tracks and a large coach yard for building and maintaining passenger trains.

But CT was only one of several Buffalo stations. The DL&W station downtown at the lake from was a beautiful building and had perhaps a dozen tracks.

The only remaining “grand” station in upstate is Utica, taken over by the county and now consists of social service offices.

Syracuse had an Art Deco rail station, which still stands and is used by a propaganda ministry (Time Warner cable news). The passenger right-of-way through the city was converted to I-690 — much like what they did in Albany with I-787.

The CSX railroad through upstate carries mostly containerized traffic from west coast ports, going to Wal Mart and the like. We also have a couple of Bakken oil trains per day to keep us motoring. There are also garbage trains coming from the city to upstate dumps. Amtrak is a sick joke, taking longer to get to NYC than the bankrupt Penn Central did 45 years ago.

The urban rot is breath taking. But at least in Syracuse we have a functioning drone base. And Schumer got us “Nu-Air” which is supposed to civilianize drones. We have economic development in upstate!

What about the Erie Canal, Upstater? Is it still usable, and may it not play a role in the future? Even after almost 2 centuries it still ranks as an engineering marvel. Didn’t Buffalo’s’ emergence as a 19th century industrial powerhouse have much to do with being the western terminus of the Erie Canal?

“The urban rot is breath taking. But at least in Syracuse we have a functioning drone base. And Schumer got us “Nu-Air” which is supposed to civilianize drones. We have economic development in upstate!”-upstate.

I will posit the notion that the Larkin Company’s values were largely a reflection of the American zeitgeist of the times during which they flourished. So follow two questions. Which are, what is the national zeitgeist now, and is there any evidence regarding into what it may/will evolve?
Frankly I’m not sure we actually have a discernible zeitgeist right now. I know this statement may seem ridiculous, but I mean this in the same way we have no discernible culture. In the sense that whatever we have it probably does not raise to the level of being sufficiently worthy of being called a culture. Rather like calling a pack of desires, notions and prejudices a “philosophy”.

Jim,
Thanks for another installment of ‘local color’. When we get out of our heads (for a brief moment) and into what is living and breathing around us, a chance to re-focus is provided. (Yes, I would consider that a ‘good’ thing. 😉 )

As to this:
“… We cannot grok the stupendous specialness of the past century, and certainly not the fact that it is bygone for good.”

I find it a little surprising that I actually CAN grok that! Perhaps it’s because I originally come from a Lake Erie farm community (Fredonia) where the local ‘industry’ was ketchup and other tomato product processing, and providing massive amounts of grapes for Welch’s over in Westfield. This area has incredibly rich glacial deposits of silt where food crops can be grown well beyond a subsistence level. (Winters are howlingly harsh with gales off the lake; but there’s your trade-off.) Hmmm, acreage cultivated in hemp for rope and sails might be a good idea.

The wind-down/crash (however it should shake out) of industrial civilization I find to be quite sad, mostly from the perspective of tragically wasted potentials (and, of course, the ease and comfort of what it provided.)

You’re right about what’s in Buffalo’s future as a trade center (should enough humans with a few brain cells to rub together survive the dissolution of cheap energy tech). The linkage through the Lakes and the Erie Canal (if that can be maintained) are crucial components in any sort of viable future of the town.

I’ll be down at the Demolition Derby, drinking draft beer, in the cheap bleacher seats, watching those crazy cars crash into each other, full throttle.

(as demolition derby will be the spectator sport of the future, all these cars millions of ’em setting idle with no gas to run them, but enough gas for demolition derby, like my brother in law who never has any money but there’s always money for beer)

When Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, he took them to the desert, and kept them there for a long time…..kept them there until every last Jew who had known slavery was dead….can’t teach an old dog new tricks is the moral of that story. Only the Jews who were born to freedom moved on. So it will be with Murica.

Too many people in Murica today can’t imagine not driving two blocks to 7-11 and it’s those people who are holding us back from doing what needs to be done. They’re old dogs who can’t imagine any other way to exist.

Think about why people settled upstate, it wasn’t because of the nice weather. Upstate, and the Midwest, had natural resources, navigable inland seas connected to the Atlantic via the Erie Canal, cheap hydro-power. People moved up their for real reasons, they were in tune with reality. Eventually Murica will come out of it’s fantasy, but not before the deluded die off in their artificial Vegas (desert) ‘paradises’.

I’m not an especially religious person, but the longer I live the more I’m convinced that those old bible dudes knew human nature better than any psychologist alive today.

I wonder if maybe all pre-industrialized, pre-financialized, pre-professionalized people don’t know human nature better than any psychologist alive today. They had a lot of time to think about human behavior, based on actual interactions with people. They weren’t trying to develop and sell a theory, but to deal with people. People don’t exist in controlled double-blind studies typically. Interacting with people as they go about their business will tell you a lot more about them.

Your points are very interesting and make perfect sense. Your point about Moses and his band of Hebrews is spot on. In fact, I understand that the reason for Moses dragging them around for forty years in the desert was so that two generations would pass before they entered the Promised Land. This I think is explained in the Talmud. Moses knew his refugees yearned for the “flesh-pits” of Egypt. They were not just physical slaves, more importantly they were moral slaves. They liked the Egyptian culture of the time even though they followed Moses. Proof? What happened at Mt Sinai. Moses leaves for 40 days and lo they cast a golden calf in his absence! All organized by Moses’ brother, no less. So much for “democracy”. Lots of lessons in the stories of these “old bible dudes”!

No, Dathan made Aaron build the calf. At least that’s the Cecil B DeMille version. I really identify with Charlton Heston throwing the Tablets at them and it becoming a Bomb in mid-air. If you don’t live by the Law, then die by it He thunders.

The Book of Exodus is a manual on industrial terrorism. The story itself has been proven untrue. There is not a scrap of archeological evidence to suggest 600,000 Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years. The same can be said about the entire Golden Age of a united Israel, and King David and Solomon. All of it is a lie, or to be kind, a myth. On the other hand, that is in interesting theory. I have never heard that was the reason for the wandering.

Seawolf may want to do a little more homework. There is certainly mythological overlay throughout the Old Testament, but other than those few works which are intentionally instructive (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, etal) or intentionally metaphorical (both creation stories) the writings are mostly based on actual events and real people.

The Exodus account presents a fascinating picture of a contentious folk following a somewhat mad Egyptian expatriate in search of an ancestral homeland which, at the time, must have seemed of mythic proportions. War, intrigue, murder, rebellion. want, and petty political shenanigans followed the children of Isis-Ra-El all the way to the land of Canaan, only to find it populated by settled peoples who wanted nothing to do with the interlopers from the west. The result – more mayhem!

This is the naked story of humankind in its early experiments with civilization. The Old Testament is a wonderful, gritty read – not at all like the polished Hollywood movies produced by the likes of Demille and Wyler.

And yes, the OT predicts much of what we call psychology, as well as anthropology, history and philosophy. A personal note: I’ve always considered philosophy to be the artless younger sibling of religion…just my opinion.

The reason given was to punish the Jews who worshiped the Golden Calf I believe. They were not worthy to enter in except for Joshua and the few remaining elders who had refused to bow down to the calf.

So should we make Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf” our Bible? We could do worse. London was a National Socialist who believed in an America for the White Middle Class. His whole life is a rebuke to the traitor Marxists who hate America and the White Race.

The Sea Wolf, or Wolf Larson, admitted that he should never have opened up “these books”. His philosophy was the same as his brutish brother Death Larson who couldn’t even read. All he did was to cause himself the doubt and pain of self consciousness and he transformed into Lucifer.

Another story is developing that is not quite ready for primetime discussion because the hacks of propaganda don’t quite know how to spin it, (mainly for Obama but even the Pubbie hacks are stymied)

That is the flood of migrants from mexico. And they don’t come to Murka for less, they want more, a lot more than they get in their home country.

Myself I’m ready for the whole ball of wax of the “Camp of the Saints”, I want steamships, planes, trains and cars full of migrants from the world over landing on Murka’s shores and “wanting more.”

So Jim is off in his timing, the maniacs are in our near future, perhaps within a week or so once a few soundbites about this migrant wave are tested on the usual stupid people and peddled to us as the righteous truth.

Tens of thousands, many of them unaccompanied children. It really is a camp of saints scenario we are seeing on our southern border. One correction tho is that these people originate in Central America not Mexico, but transit thru Mexico.They must be getting a lot of help to reach here, but who is helping them. Turns out La Raza members Obama has staffed our Central American embassies with are helping out in a big way.

At one time, not that long ago, it was the job of the State Dept and foreign embassies to look out for the interests of the United States. Is this still the case?

We must harden our hearts against these young enemies. They are cute now – just as tiger cubs are. It changes nothing. The children’s crusade in old Europe never reached the Holy Land. Likewise we must derail this army.

Someone on another site had the idea of a special type of dump truck that would back up to the border and then just dump the illegals out on the Mexican side. Obviously this would have to be in concert with armed guards, the Wall, drones, e-verify etc. It is a fine idea when seen in those terms.

The Fed is trying to forestall a restructuring of the US economy to a sustainable footing. Why? Don’t ask the Fed. They won’t tell you. Lying is to the Fed what hammers are to carpenters so we can only speculate.

Here’s one scenario: the Fed and its oligarch masters knew they were killing the American economy. Offshoring, as orchestrated by oligarchs, would be its death, Wall Street institutions would be the undertakers, the Buffalos and Detroits would be the corpses.

Kill the US economy? Not that the oligarchs give a shit. These people know no limits. Wall Street would, in due course and of necessity, die too. Not that the oligarchs give a shit about that either. These guys don’t give a shit about much.

In the meantime, in this end of the world end-game, the Fed would do what the Fed does: print money.

This would buy the oligarchs some time for a few more speculative blow outs. And so this past 20 years the oligarchs plundered mind-boggling amounts of money.

Imagine though, oligarchs getting the Fed to systematically destroy the money that the oligarchs are trying to steal. Oligarchs knowingly destroying the institutions where they stash their loot. These oligarchs actually think that somehow they’ll survive this. You don’t get it? Frankly, neither do I.

They’ve planned it out and it’s worked up to now. But they are behind schedule and people like Alex Jones are really hurting them now. As Brezinski said, it’s now easier to kill a million people than control them with lies. But countless fools still buy into the opening the borders madness so they still have the upper hand. The immigrants will vote Democrat and that party is even more under the thumb of the Plutocrats than the Republicans (only because of the Tea Party of course, the mainstream are a bunch of yes men).

What will be different for our nation is that, unlike previous world powers that entered collapse, none of them had weapons of world destruction in their control to worry about.

How will a nation in serious decline deal with thousands of nuclear missiles and material under their control? Will we wisely and rationally deactivate and “safely” hide/get rid of them? Or when times get much tougher than they are now, will we use them or have them used against us?

The nuclear missile defense system is nothing if not a massively complex, interconnected system. If such systems are bound for failure in the future, where does that leave the missiles-and us?

What about our size?

We’ve become a nation of 320+ million people. Depending on events and how they emerge going forward, how are we going to feed that many people in the near future without cheap energy inputs? You can try, but turning this nation into a nation of farmers overnight is basically fantasy. Will a dangerous pathogen emerge from a hungry, weakened population that will determine our future?

I don’t think this is going to be like declines in the past. If those big precipitating events come close together, you and me are toast. If they’re spread out over the next 20 years or so, it just means the worse choices await those alive during that time.

I think a lot of nuclear weapons have been dismantled so their payload could become fuel for nuclear reactors. In an energy scarce world, you can’t have mega joules of energy just sitting atop a missile.

Agreed. By Orlov’s model, stage 1 (financial) already happened and threaded through to stage 2 (commercial). We are now dove-taling into stage 3 (political).

Of course, I don’t bother discussing anything of the sort with dorks that say things like “and yet, everything just keeps going along…”

Open your frackin’ eyes (rhetorical).

“How will a nation in serious decline deal with thousands of nuclear missiles and material under their control? Will we wisely and rationally deactivate and “safely” hide/get rid of them? Or when times get much tougher than they are now, will we use them or have them used against us?”-13.

Now factor in disintegrating capacity to control our rate of descent.

WHO is going to secure these sites when the situation passes a certain point. These are military assets that can _never_ be allowed to fall into the hands of people that would actually use them, and we are fresh out of enough _forever_ to cover that.

This is the stuff that keeps rational actors awake into the wee-hours.

As a regular visitor to the USA I am stagggered by the decline of many urban areas
While Detroit and Buffalo are outstanding examples I see much decline everywhere…and all in sharp contrast to many ”
older” European cities which are modern while keeping their ancient features..places like Zurich,Strabourg or even Vienna of Hamburg

Again the new asian centres like Singapore of Kuala Lunpur have a host of great features

It seems that only the military in the American Empire still have the money to build and construct
I think of a great US bases ion Germany I recently viewed…and why ?why there for ? what purpose?
the US decline is now much better seen in these aspects

“I’m convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century”

Ok but when? I’m not seeing that any economy of any kind will be around to replace the hallucination.

If you mean a world resembling the sixteenth century where the Great Lakes area is a wild uninhabited wilderness you may be right. But a functioning economy? That would require resources and they are all going away. There is not one chance in a thousand things will work out because no preparations for a post industrial economy is or will be made. The patina of denial is too thick. Empty asphalt pads with mulleins and sumacs spiking up through the pavement is our future. Then in time even the empty asphalt pads shall disappear and mulleins will no longer be there to mark the grave of America’s twentieth century industrial economy. The stupendous specialness of the past century will be bygone for good. A sour blossom of decay and collapse will blossom throughout the Great Lakes region and in the end what was then will be forgotten in a new now of nothing.

Remember the Great Lakes was an Indian commercial zone as well with trade extending over a thousand miles by canoe. A special type of clay was found in the area (Minnesota I think) that was highly valued for the pipes they smoked. And of course there was a fur and tobacco trade as well.

Thus you are being too pessimistic long term. Very long term I admit. The world is as we dream it. A guy told me how depressed the Canadian Maritimes was – as if that was intrinsic to the area in and of itself. I have no doubt the a group of high IQ, high tech, highly motivated and selfless people could create a paradise in that part of the world.

Pipestone not clay. I don’t think there was fur trade until the white man satan came to their land. Such things were of local supply. Tobacco I believe they traded. That a group of high IQ, high tech, highly motivated and selfless people could create a paradise is always true. True, given the means mission opportunity and budget.

There’s other countries with nukes that are headed down the shitter: Pakistan, India, North Korea.

People used to scoff at the idea of a Taliban take-over of Pakistan. Personally I think complacency is a dangerous thing. What are realistic odds?

American intelligence agencies, like the US foreign policy establishment, are notorious inside-the-box thinkers. They never see what’s coming until events overtake them.

What if it happens? What of Pakistan’s nukes?

Don’t count on “rationality”. It’s never been a restraint. People say, yes, Iran will acquire the Bomb, but so what? The mullahs are “rational”.

Yeah, well, we’ve heard all this before. In the 1930s people thought that Hitler could be dealt with and war averted through appeasement and diplomacy. Surely, “reason” would prevail. Surely, experienced, wise, calm, level-headed leaders like Chamberlain would have things well in hand?

Good morning,
And then there’s;
“Goats gotta go: Detroit’s head of animal control says the billy goats have to go, after hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel dropped off 20 grass grazers in the city’s rundown areas. Spitznagel hoped the goats would eat the overgrown grass around the abandoned buildings downtown as part of his plan to promote urban renewal and farming, reported the New York Times. The goats have to be removed by Monday or will be seized by the city, after Detroit officials read about the goats in paper.” (marketwatch.com article)

** Boy, we can’t have any progressive solutions can we?
It’s not a bad idea. There’s probably nothing else there anyway.
Sheesh!

This article was not about a successful mining operation. It was about a demonstration of proof of concept. And as no details were given I think nothing but hot air is behind it. The only methane gas is coming from you.

As someone who assisted the founder of that bike tour with its first iteration back around 2006, I am proud that JHK went on it. I wish I could have joined you.

I want to stress that there is no single, monolithic Buffalo any more than there is a single, monolithic Chicago. The urban prairie of Buffalo’s east side is real. The refugees and millennials revitalizing Buffalo’s west side are no less real.

Let’s hope those youngsters and others revitalizing Buffalo create a human culture as supportive as the Larkin Soap Company. If Kontrahend’s methane hydrates can in fact be mined net negative CO2 they won’t have any difficulty heating and powering their homes, or – shudder — driving their personal transport vehicles, at least for the next 6000 years.

Elsewhere in Canada (Edmonton) they are scaling up waste-to-biofuel. Good lord, at this rate we might have to reconsider that half-empty glass.

I believe that local food can make a HUGE impact on the local economy IF it can find enough customers to buy it.

Here in Miami, there’s a whole lotta hype about it too, but the hype is about prepared foods, breweries, restaurants, food trucks, etc. In short, higher priced stuff that is unsustainable if incomes fall substantially. I see what people buy at the “local producers only” farmers’ markets and at the raw dairy/pastured meats food club. With some exceptions, it’s not a lot of food–they must not be cooking much at home. When I start to see that change, or gardens going into backyards, or people planting fruit trees on the empty lots nearby, then I’ll know the tide has turned.

It’s coming, but ever so slowly.

BTW: when I hear that bs about America not being able to feed itself without industrial ag, I know the speaker has never walked around their block and see all the idle unproductive land not producing food.

Wait… I’m VERY confused. I was at that same conference this weekend. The final party was at Larkin Square, the site of the reused Larkin buildings. There was a permanent performance venue, stages, restaurants, reclaimed office buildings, bars, new street lighting… very well done and very used by the city. There were food trucks and a craft fair, local micro brews, even a new distillery. Both Larkin buildings are packed with businesses and tenants.
I took the tour of the east side, but I also saw Canal Side and the reclaimed waterfront, Allentown, Elmwood Village, the gardens on Richmand Ave, and the Chippewa nightclub district (we heard excellent music at the rooftop Skybar). Were we at the same conference?

There was a permanent performance venue, stages, restaurants, reclaimed office buildings, bars, new street lighting… very well done and very used by the city. There were food trucks and a craft fair, local micro brews, even a new distillery. Both Larkin buildings are packed with businesses and tenants.

chalk it up to literary license. endtymers always massively exaggerate. i used to be one, until i saw what you saw – there is a huge renaissance of small-scale entrepreneurship going on in the US. While this takes place, jhk’s sycophants like to describe massive destitution, alienation and the fact that no one will ever work again due to robots.

it is limited one-to-one, linear thinking that fails like a very bad move on the chessboard.

Thank you kontrahend. I walked away from that conference inspired by the renewal going on in Buffalo. The East Side tour was more like “here is what we’re starting with”, and much of the rest of Buffalo was like “here’s what we can do”. Buffalo has nothing to be ashamed of. For every Larkin Administration Bldg. in its past, there seems to be a restored Darwin Martin House (also FLW) in its future.

Kontra — I am a skeptic when it comes to energy alternatives but I keep an open mind, and follow the trades daily in my line of work. I think even with unimaginable breakthroughs in chemical and mechanical engineering K-Dog’s vision of Barbarians is not to be dismissed. If you have any doubts just watch The Wire.

The entrepreneurship and revitalization of decaying urban neighborhoods you cite is encouraging, but I am not convinced that the millennials (I co-created one) are the most motivated generation. Apparently a lot of them are still living at home. I see a lot of “space available” signs out there.

“and so late as the days of Orosius, who wrote in the fifth century, wretched cottages, scattered amidst the ruins of magnificent cities, still recorded the rage of the barbarians.” — ‘History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, E. Gibbon

Looking at how our cities already decline in a century ruins of our magnificent cities will be widely scattered. The desolate landscapes where wretched cottages are scattered will be surrounded by only the ghost of former cities about them. Widely scattered will be imitations of the the past Roman greatness which built mostly of stone in the 19th century as civic architecture and as museums and mansions of then magnates rot slowly like the originals Roman architecture did. Twentieth century architecture rotted to humus and will be streaked by loose earth strata of man made material less digestible by mother earth. The form of former structures already lost, digested by time or picked apart by scavengers.

A sour blossom of decay and collapse will bloom throughout the Great Lakes region and in the end what was then will be forgotten in a new now of nothing. An economy might emerge in a post-post-industrial time a century hence but the rage of the barbarians will have made ruin of any but the most local economies until then. The Great Lakes region can be the center of an internally-focused North American economy but the hallucination of oil-powered globalism will have to dissolve long before that can possibly happen. America will first have to learn to feed itself for in this and just about any realm of activity this nation does not know how to act. In the near future it may not be possible to watch Youtube videos to learn to sail and future sails will be made of hemp. In America hemp is not yet grown and the hallucination of oil-powered life already dissolves about us. We are not ready and we can’t possibly get ready in time to prevent the barbaric.

Food shelter and clothing will be top priority for a long long time. New faces not ours will center any internally-focused North American economy in the Great Lakes region should it ever happen.

I’ll enjoy World Made By Hand three as much as I did one and two. But it shall be the grandchildren of Stephen Bullock and Wayne Karp who will inherit the future, not them.

Readers, a quick aside. The MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) company called Coursera.org has a free class called “Our Energy Future” delivered by UC-San Diego. I have watched the first lecture and it looks good. I plan to blog on the class discussion boards about Jim’s books “The Long Emergency” and “Too Much Magic” and also about the issue of peak oil.

Great column about Buffalo today. Things are different here on the West Coast in Portland, Oregon, but there are some clear indications here of social change in the face of a restricted economic future faced particularly by young people. Inner east-side property in Portland is being rapidly developed because of its proximity to the central city, waterfront, transit corridors and relative walkability. The suburbs in this part of the US are clearly atrophying when looked at in total.

a lot of the history jhk references is only viewable in one place – the buffalo history museum.

now i know why offices all across this country have one word over a scenic photograph of the natural world like …INTEGRITY overlaying a forest of redwoods. it is like passive meditation, you see it, it registers in you subconscious but application may not be readily apparent or at hand. all you really see is a nice forest of trees you would like to explore in person as opposed to your immediate manmade environ.

It is truly amazing what cheap energy and sound money meant to America. I look at shows like “Mad Men” and wonder how lucky it must have been to live in that glorious age. It was like the JFK assassination was the exclamation point that ended the sentence forever. At that moment in time, it really was as good as it gets. After that it was as George Carlin famously put it “CTD,” circling the drain. My entire life has been riding the slide, the slow, inexorable, inevitable descent into the darkness of a nation in the twilight of its life.

“The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways ; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.” – Joseph Glanville.

Nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of his works. But an era of cheap energy and sound money as seawolf77 put it made us forget the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of his works.

Our slow circling of the drain is nature’s way of restoring a balance we did not appreciate.

Poe quotes Glanville in at least one other story – the Lady Ligeia. Maybe he liked his moral teachings, but even more, I bet he loved the power of his prose. This Glanville can write. I should look into ordering a volume of him. In a decaying culture like ours, no one takes themselves or anything else seriously enough to write with such grandeur. Poetry too is dying since we don’t share enough common symbols to write it – even when we have the requisite sensitivity for it. Scathing critique is our remaining bastion and Mr Kunstler, our literary god.

I’m willing to share the Truth with you. Pipestone is a clayey stone, soft and easy to work.

Um, here is what JHK described:
“a haunted brick behemoth plangent with silence, ailanthus trees sprouting from the parapets and birds nesting in the gigantic, rusted ventilation fans…. The site became a parking lot and now is just an empty asphalt pad with mulleins and sumacs spiking up in the pavement.”

Read JHK again he, clearly talks about the administration building and your Larkin Square is on the site of former warehouse buildings. A site which perhaps in a hundred years will be the site of waterfront warehouses again, as it should be.

The comment you quoted actually transported me back to 1994 when I rode a train into East Saint Louis and noticed trees growing on buildings. Shocked me for a bit, showed me just what decay was and that it had made its way into the USA.

well, right on cue come the 7th graders with ‘fart’ and ‘you lie’ lol, what a disappointed bunch of youngsters that don’t like the taste of sour grapes, i.e. their arguments are refuted by the facts on the ground so they resort to name calling.

jhk, why do you put up with this? is this the best YOU can do?

where is the rebuttal of hydrates providing 3k years of energy?

lol, thanks for the laugh in passing, think i`ll go talk to some grownups.

So you repeat your link without answering. Your article is not about a successful mining operation but is only a claim of proof of concept without any details given. A dog and pony show. I think nothing but hot air is behind it and you have not addressed the challenge of showing it to be otherwise.

You are lost in a nirvana of computer-printed reality. You are always showing up with dreams of a technical rescues that when examined turn out to violate thermodynamic considerations. That E.R.O.I would be a far more serious problem to Methane Haresting operations far worse than it is with gas and oil fracking technologies is something beyond your fantasies; and be you sane, beyond your ethics.

Steven Chu has not been Energy Secretary for some time now, leaving after the first Obama term. The article you cited originally dates to 2012.

Methane Hydrates have been on the radar not only as an energy source but as an anxiety for the Climate Change true believers, who fear the warming of the tundras and oceans will release the methane unimpeded to the atmosphere in a form of thermal runaway. If the methane is mined conventionally and combusted for heat the effect is ultimately the same.

Harvesting via a quasi-fracking technique using captured CO2 then sequestering it as “dry ice” in the place of the mined methane sounds ideal, although it is not clear from a quick scan via Google if that is the technique currently used by the Japanese. it comes as no surprise they are actively interested in this since they have been at a fossil fuel disadvantage for their entire modern existence. I recall US cessation of oil flows as the proximate cause of Pearl Harbor. Today we see them in a dispute with China that is likely a contest over energy resources.

Nevertheless thanks for interjecting this into the discussion. There will be reflexive dismissive responses but surely you anticipate this. Who knows? They may be correct. To paraphrase a source I have forgotten, I never learned anything listening to the sound of my own voice.

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu contributed a statement to an announced breakthrough in research into tapping the vast fuel resource of methane hydrates that could eventually bolster already massive U.S. natural gas reserves.

Gerald Holder, dean of the engineering program at University of Pittsburgh, who has worked with the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory on the hydrate issue, said before the announcement he had been sceptical about what researchers would be able to accomplish.He said the main problem until now was finding a way to extract natural gas from solid hydrates without adding a whole lot of steps that made the process too expensive, which makes the success of this new test significant.“It makes the possibility of recovering methane from hydrates much more likely. It’s a long way off, but this could have huge impact on availability of natural gas,” said Holder.

Having a way to process them does not change the fact they have never been successfully mined. Hydrates, if mined will never be done cost effectively. The deposits are too scattered.

But you should get a prize for finding so many new ways to arrange the Titanic deck chairs.

“We salute the drumbeaters of despair as we soar high above them into a future of superabundance and cornucopia”

I see that you still don’t get that we are all in this together and any workable solutions can’t leave people behind. You think you can remain “modern” by simply moving beyond old smoke and clanking machinery with new technology that belongs to science fiction not science. Your Luddite ways show. The truth is you can’t stomach change and you drool for any sweet technical fix that lets society run exactly as it has been running with all defects intact.

“So far humanity has not devised a process to economically harvest this immense energy wealth.”

There it is end of story. Confabulating some bullshit about how we could now process them into fuel more economically if we had them does not put accessible cathrate deposits in the ground.

The people behind ‘Abundance of Methane Hydrates will Destroy the Oil Market’ are also behind the “shale oil miracle” and the “manufacturing renaissance”. Disreputable tricksters pushing a phony line to make a buck. Toxic bacteria leaking from every orifice. Perhaps like you.

An ancient but relevant saying comes to mind: “Strategy without tactics is the longest route to victory, but Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”.

There are those people who only believe what they see in the short term.

They sell a pound of meth or sign a contract to get paid “3-million a year” by Google to write code, and they think that they’re the Second Coming. That they are Right and everyone else is self-evidently Wrong. They actually believe that they’re next ‘iterative and incremental improvement’ of Humanity.

And then they have a rude awakening.

These are the kind of folks who win a few battles and lose the war.

These are the folk who charge into life with a pocketful ‘o’ tactics and no strategy.

I’ve seen ’em come & seen ’em go… Literally.

So far I’ve seen that there are those who are interested in actually interested in engaging problems – who tackle the salient points in an argument – and those that back into their corners repeating their self-assuaging mantras.

Meanwhile we are at that plot-point in our collective drama that’s like the scene in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” when the bible-salesman (John Goodman) stands up, dusts off his slacks and reaches up for a nice think branch…

We may be at that plot-point in our collective drama but I fear I’m ‘Pete’ the toad in the box.

“They sell a pound of meth or sign a contract to get paid “3-million a year” by Google to write code, and they think that they’re the Second Coming. That they are Right and everyone else is self-evidently Wrong. They actually believe that they’re next ‘iterative and incremental improvement’ of Humanity.”

Being as humans are social animals all it takes is the approval of a tiny group. Desire mixes with the hubris of collective group think and thought becomes a cold hearted orb that rules the night. Rational thought abhors a crowd yet thoughts in a crowd seem rational.

“Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight,
Red is gray and yellow white,”

“But we decide which is right.”

“And which is an illusion.”

But not while standing in the crowd where the hunger for approval makes us think we are the second coming and red is grey and yellow white.

what is interesting about the larkin business model is how much everyone is copying them today. amazon is rising and setting trends with its mail order business powered by the internet. larkin was a mail order company with a floor dedicated to mail and another floor dedicated to typewriters. amazon was based out of an art deco medical center in seattle with a very sturdy, dependable power system and has moved into a very well lit, huge, pink toned building and friendly neighborhood near the cascades. larkin never got around to building the planned tract homes…maybe because of the depression.
bezos has an excellent corporate culture centered around what people need to work more efficiently. he is creating real jobs. however, he is aware that his business in its current incarnation could evaporate overnight. maybe amazon should just stick to digital archiving instead of going into retail like larkin, spreading itself too thin and becoming vulnerable to the changing whims of the markets.

the demolished frank building is a real life example of how it became too expensive to maintain its intricate airconditioning systems and some of the materials frank uses just fall apart over time. eventhough it was only five stories high, i didnt see anything about it containing elevators.

“All the action is on the Lake Erie waterfront where trade is conducted by sailing ships at the scale of Sixteenth century, but with an identifiable American gloss.”-J H K.

Okay, I must admit that I like this vision. Never mind that it there are problems with it from a literalists point of view. This is a form of brainstorming, after all.[*]

“I’d be surprised if one in a thousand educated people in this country (including the New Urbanists) can take that vision seriously. But do you suppose that the executives of an enterprise like the Larkin Company in 1915 would have ever imagined the desolation of Buffalo a mere 99 years later?”-J H K.

It wouldn’t be the first time that America (or myself, for that matter) had to weather the bombast of people utterly convinced that apparently ‘natural order’ of things HAD to continue, with no end in sight, and that if you showed any doubt you Just Didn’t Get It . . .

It’s a time-honored American tradition.

Don’t get me wrong. If the owners of the historic Larkin property have achieved 100% occupancy, that is no small achievement. I admire that.

On the other hand, if those businesses are 90% focused on an evaporating consumer base, condolences will be forthcoming, in due course.

Yes as the watershed you are talking about covers the entire great lakes region this might be a concern.

Check it out. Someone named James Howard Kunstler wrote an article called ‘That Was Then, This is Now’ and it was reprinted at Zero Hedge today. The article drew a comment concerning nuclear power plants and the author posted a map!

Keeee-wrecked! If even half of those “modern marvels” should go critical, we in the NE are done and dusted.

It would be instructive for us all to remember that techno-triumphalism built these as a confident response to, “Progress is the human truism… they’ll always think of something!” Yyyyeah, “they thought of something” alrighty, they just didn’t think it THROUGH and now we’re faced with a predicament. “They’ll think of something to fix that!”, doesn’t [personally] inspire a lot of confidence in “they”.

(“What’ll they think of next?!?”. is going to be an expression of horror rather than wonder if things keep “improving” in this manner. I ain’t no Luddite, but appropriate technology, scaled to the task, that will allow nature to re-heal after the initial insult is what is required. Catering to every human whim, conceit and comfort is the pursuit of madness that would make a slave of nature, not a partner.)

…And I would agree that the technology of early 20th century sail would do quite nicely, although it’s doubtful this technology will be re-discovered before financial dissolution. Captain Erikson:

An aside: I’m not worried about the earth re-healing itself from artificially enhanced nuclear poisoning, that will happen. It’s probably just that the timeline might not include any homo-not-so-sapiens as part of the mix. Oh well, you invests yer capital, you takes yer chance…

I brought the point about the nuke-sites up (gently) not to depress or frighten anyone, but to make the point that an interesting and thoroughly livable future IS possible IF certain deal-killers are taken care of first.

The greatest threats to us – individually and collectively- don’t come from sensationalized small-scale dangers and annoyances. They come from the people who have the most resources, which makes them nearly impossible to solve or mitigate as a society, which is why we’ve accumulated such a huge collection of them:

‘Terrorists’ didn’t undermine America’s geo-political standing in any comparable to the job that a collection of financial swindle-heads did.

But this problem doesn’t get tackled with rigor and discipline in America because _money_ is the final arbiter and the private sector operating in a supposedly ‘free market’ is in ascendance. They are in a position to set priorities. And the results of that regime is in.

Unless we see a radical reorganization of priorities, do not expect that these top-line threats will be dealt with. However, do expect that ‘TPTB’ will waste a lot of time and money on the things that matter least – because it’s good ‘theater’.

SO, where does that leave us, if we want to continue the planning process? We have to allow for worst-case scenarios as well as ‘adequate’ and utopian ones.

What does the scenario look like where each of these radiological sites is melting down? How soon would they start after a system-collapse? Which ones first?

“Unless we see a radical reorganization of priorities, do not expect that these top-line threats will be dealt with. However, do expect that ‘TPTB’ will waste a lot of time and money on the things that matter least – because it’s good ‘theater’.” -MD

No priority reorganization. Count on that. The theater is good cover for a final profit-taking (as I think you’re implying).

“SO, where does that leave us, if we want to continue the planning process? We have to allow for worst-case scenarios as well as ‘adequate’ and utopian ones.” -MD

Figure for worst-case (human asshole-wise). That’s the most pragmatic default position from my experience. How about yours?

“What does the scenario look like where each of these radiological sites is melting down? How soon would they start after a system-collapse? Which ones first?” -MD

I think we would see a lot of desperate MIGRATION. America (of the US) would certainly be heading for South and Central America where these time-bombs are not so numerous. Wonder how we’d be received? I’m not privy to the factoids about how long it takes for TS to HTF after the cooling pumps no longer function. More than a lunchtime; less than a week? Not long enough to raise chir’rens old enough to ‘appreciate’ Disneyworld, most likely. Which ones first? Will there be anyone with the wherewithal and know-how to get it done, even without governmental stonewalling?

Since we’re picking at new-fangled, whiz-bang energy miracles here’s a treatise I think might interest you (and K-Dog) as much as it did me. It shows how our ‘ingenuity’ about energy production might just not bite us in the butt; it could cave in the back of our skulls with a two-handed battle axe. A thoughtful smackdown of smug and self-satisfied cornucopian energy nonsense. Three Futures.

noone can plan 99 yrs ahead with success because of it being beyond average lifespans and next gen takes over and make decisions based on what is important to them with whatever money they may or may not have. food is important, so they have a food court catered by food trucks in what is now a “office park”.
it would have been a lovely experience to eat lunch 5 stories high in a traditional cafeteria style, white table clothes and real silver, overlooking the waterways and bulidings. however most buildings have restaurants on ground or 2nd because of easy access. lugging 500 lbs of groceries up stairs or elevators isnt very practical.

the indigent, like everyone else, are catered to by various charities subsidized by the offices. most of this class are highly conservative and dumster dive, fish and basically live off the waste of the rich. america is a big waster of food because it inflates the prices. really, we should only be paying 50s food prices today because it still grows as fast and in the same places now as then. now that food caterers are in control of the supply chain they tack on their fuel costs to deliver from far away suppliers. they are starting to local source but they want to avoid buying mire farm land and growing to meet demand.

boats sink because of their vulnerability to weather and load capacity.
however, like Chicago’s navy pier, buffalo could create a recreational pier complete with cruise ships. then it would come more in line with the club med vision.

I gave up my car 5 years ago here in Miami and when you walk you see the see a city in a different, more intimate way. There are varying levels of decay in every part of every city.

What I don’t understand though is how a landlord can allow a building to decay or even to remain unused for years. Could it all be because they simply won’t lower the rent enough to attract tenants? Even a $1 a month is better than no income for years.

I’m sympathetic to your argument but for the extreme of taking the argument down to $1 a month. Dollar a month tenants leave holes in walls that are sure to cost more than a buck a month to fix.

Giving up your car allows one to see the city in different more intimate ways I agree. I don’t know how comfortable Miami would be on a bicycle but I like a bicycle. Like walking there is much to notice that the speed and isolation of motorized transport takes away.

“What I don’t understand though is how a landlord can allow a building to decay or even to remain unused for years.”-Mike.

Simply a matter of money: with a tenant on site, there’s the cost of managing the property – however minimal – and the exposure to liability of all types. Just letting it sit empty (overlooking squatters who can be forced to pay for their removal) makes better financial sense from a property management point of view.

In all matters regarding the built environment, it helps to remember that Real Estate is the consort of Finance, b/c ultimately the cost of capital (in this case, mortgage rates) drives everything.

Yes, the Nazis and the Jews must be defeated so Eastern Ukraine can be free. Politics makes strange bedfellows does it not?

In Spain, the Communists killed thousands of priests and nuns and burned hundreds of churches. God knows what they would have done to the Catholic people (the majority) if they had won. In contrast, Franco was conspicuous by his mercy, forgiving many, giving others prison appropriate prison sentences – and only putting the real monsters to death.

It’s obvious to any objective person that the good guys won in Spain. Our elite were on the wrong side as usual. Franco didn’t like the Nazis but we refused to give him any aid since we were arming the Communists. So he did what he had to do and took arms from the Nazis.

Thanks Jim for the reference to the Larkin factory. I had been looking for a historical example of the “paternalistic” company (making a profit while trying to ideally look after their employees) for entrepreneurship studies.

Gunfights from horseback have been a staple in Hollywood westerns for 110 years. The other nite in the fairhaven section of New Haven (the Hood) there was a rolling gunfight on bicycles, right near Yale. that’s right the combatants were shooting at each other while riding their bikes. Loser was shot 3 time, winner got arrested.

there was a time when New Haven was described as the most progressive civilized city in the US, prosperity based upon Yale, Winchester, Marlin and the New Haven railroad. In the 19th century New Haven was the biggest buggy maker in the world, and the original investors 1859 Pennsylvania oil (Colonel Drake et al) came from New Haven.

Now it not a good idea to find yourself on the streets of New Haven after the sun goes down.

I envision a city as a living organism. Living organisms always have parts of itself decaying and other parts growing. Our own red blood cells, for example, wear out after only 30 days and the top layer of our skin regularly sloughs off. In fact, it is said we replace almost our entire bodies every 7 years. When you look in the mirror, the person you see is not the same one you saw a decade ago.

Such is the same with cities. Parts of a city rot away and other parts renew themselves. Did you ever see a once-blooming shrub die off until there’s only one functioning stalk left? If you prune away the dead stuff, what’s left looks pathetic, but you know what? After awhile you’ll see new shoots, and still later yet, the shrub is blooming again. Yes, sometimes the plant dies, but that’s part of nature.

So when I see decayed cities, I don’t get all upset. Many of them, if not all, will come back and ultimately thrive. I am not so presumptuous as to know what the future brings.

Bill, what about places like Port o Prince and Detroit? (for example) I don’t see them ever to be livable again in our lifetime or a hundred lifetimes.

And how is it that in Salt Lake city and in Israel successful cities are built in inhospitable deserts that have hardly any resources not even enough water. This tells me its the Human Capital which matters most.

Marlin, cities were built where they are for a reason. As long as humans populate these areas, a city in some form will remain. I can see Detroit with a population of up to fifty or a hundred thousand becoming a vibrant trading and/or farming community. Maybe this isn’t the city we’ve always known in our lifetime, but a “Detroit” in some form will probably be still there.

Kunstler says the world will blow up, and then we will all be playing fiddle in a bluegrass band and eating cornbread. Ruppert says the world will blow up and gives us nothing. Alex Jones says the world will blow up and we will all live in a police state. Rawles says the world will blow up and a bunch of white guys from Idaho will save the day. Jensen says the world will blow up and we will all live in peace and happiness as hunter-gatherers.

The one thing in common with all of these guys is that they tell us the world is going to end, and then they stop talking.

Ok, we get it. So what do we do now?

We know what we need to do now – we have the knowledge to finally build a civilization that will not fall – we know how permaculture works now. Greer gave us the 7 technologies that we can still use. Can we all stop bitching now?

For those that try to tell us that methane hydrate reserves are too scattered for commercial exploration:

Methane hydrates in the northern Gulf of Mexico alone have been estimated at more than 21,000Tcf, of which 6,700 Tcf is in high concentrations in sandy sediments – the sort of reservoir that could be most easily tapped.

We are on the cusp of a revolutionary, long-term solution to our energy needs in the form of solar/wind/other alt energy.

Methane hydrates are the final nail in the coffin of peak oil hysteria – economic necessity dictates it.

I replied earlier pointing out that Chu left office already, and the article you cited was from 2012. More recent reportage notes that Canada has suspended activity:bbc.com/news/business-27021610

Also as I wrote earlier the Japanese have great motive to pursue this given their energy dependence, and they figure prominently in a Google search of methane hydrate mining, though no mention is made of a net negative CO2 protocol. This would be mandatory in the present EPA environment, unless of course necessity — as in the Bakken all fracked out — dictated otherwise.

The instability of the sea floor is a major concern, and the technological challenge of corralling exactly that which one hopes to mine as it threatens to change phase is daunting. to say the least.

Whoa wait a minute there Oz. What’s that big wagon of yours got under the hood? I’m guessing 454 cu in. of gas guzzling Detroit Iron sweetness, 8 cylinder, powerglyde tranny and 4 barrel carb on that baby. they don’y make ’em like that anymore I DONT BLAME YOU FOR HANGING ONTO TO IT ITS IRREPLACEABLE.

I hear you…I’ll be hanging onto this big Silverado forever, tow package, off road package, big 8, 17in wheels. Ya it sucks precious and disappearing gasoline but like I said before I don’t burn up in one year in that truck what Al Gore burns up taxiing around the runway at the Stockholm airport, in his private 747 in Sweden to pick up yet another shitsucking, asskissing global warming award.

Yessiree, it’s an heirloom from my father-in-law; a ’92 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon with a 5.7liter V-8. Had the tranny rebuilt with a Corvette kit after the POS 702 crapped out at 75k.
Now, riddle me this: Why does this 9-passenger monster boat, built on a light truck frame, get 21 mpg when mod’ren full-size sedans have trouble reaching that average? (That’s what I said; 21, not 12.) What went wrong with all that efficiency-tech we heard so much about? Traded away for what? (Don’t forget that cash-for-clunkers thing that revivified auto sales and saved duh economee.)

BTW, I put a total of about 200 miles on it last year, so the guzzlement allocation on that baby was about 10 gallons. I get it out just enough to wring it out and limber it up.

I can think of at least a dozen ways the world can end, from a meteor strike to WW3. If a big rock falls onto us, then we don’t have to worry about war, because we’ll be done. If a nuclear exchange occurs, do we have to worry about about a space-based extinction event. If a 90% lethal pandemic occurs, do we have to worry about lack of electricity from an EMP, or be concerned about a market collapse?

Really, what do you prepare for, or what actions do you take for each eventuality? You really can’t do much. Are you going to survive a nuclear war, and even if you do, do you want to live in the aftermath of that world? It’s easy to say yes, but really?

We talk so blasé about these collapse events, but do you want to live in a climate change world, where your primary activity is trying to find food, always being on the edge of starvation, with no other goals or hopes except to live one more day?

Why worry? There’s nothing effective you can do about preventing any of the shit you are afraid of. So just live your life cheerfully, as best you can, and don’t focus on all the negatives.

“There’s nothing effective you can do about preventing any of the shit you are afraid of. ”

This is the mentality that I fight every day. I long ago stopped trying to wake up the sheep and focused on those who were already in the process of waking up.

Who the hell says that there is nothing I can do? I can build the next civilization, and the next culture, while this one is falling. I can grow my own clean food and teach others how to do it. I can engage in a new relationship with technology where I am the one in control, and not the other way around.

Climate change? Mother Nature has a thermostat, called volcanoes. I don’t think we have to worry about that one. Nuclear? If we broke it we can fix it. Mother Nature can help. Hemp and sunflowers can clean radiation and heavy metals from soils. We have the power to fix what we broke. Peak energy? Good!

This is all a test for humanity. It’s obvious we have failed up until now but it ain’t over until the last of us is dead. I for one don’t plan to lie down in my bunker and wait for that to happen. If I fail, at least I will know I tried, and gave it my best.

Who wants to live in that kind of world? I do! This is the most important time in the history of our race, and you are just giving up?

I’m thoroughly unimpressed. For those of you who haven’t given up on the planet and humanity yet, you know what to do:

Actually, I think you jumped to conclusions. I never said all the bad stuff would happen, only that it could happen. If the end of the world comes, by definition we will all be dead anyway, so we might as well not worry about that. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t see the end of the world occurring, but I’m an optimist by nature – I just spoke the language of the fearful ones in my earlier post.

I find your attitude refreshing, but your beliefs appear to me to be naive. You will not survive a nuclear war for long, if at all. Even a limited nuclear exchange will probably cause a nuclear winter. Try getting along without sunshine for 10-15 years. Try growing your own food in irradiated soil and air – there won’t be any hemp and sunflower seeds. Oh, yeah, there’s irradiated drinking water, too.

You can live so properly that your immune system is maxed-out strong, but if a mutated, deadly virus breaks out, your immune system won’t know how to deal with it. If, and by the time scientists figure out how to fight the virus, and distribute it to the populace, there won’t be much of a population left.

If you are in the wrong spot when a meteor strike occurs, no way can you live through it unless you’re Superman. Then there’s the Yellowstone supervolcano. If that erupts, all of CONUS will be buried under 8 feet of volcanic dust.

My point is, JHK’s energy shortage is on the rather benign end of the future issues scale. We can survive that. But nearly as equally probable, other non-survivable events will cause the extinction of the human race. And those are the ones I’m talking about. Personally, though, I believe these horrific scenarios won’t occur. But if they do, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Just don’t worry about it.

We are manufacturers of cognitive dissonance. That nice comforting feeling of knowing food and gas will always be readily available is threatened. That nice smooth circle becomes an ungainly square and it no longer fits in the round hole. What to do, what to do? Round off them their corners with what ifs and maybes, sandpaper with shrill voice and increased volume, and then pound it back in with a rubber mallet of pundits. Cognitive dissonance is gone. Where did it go? I don’t know. It was here, but now it’s not anymore. Go to the store, by some Cocoa Puffs and milk, sit in front of the TV, and read the back of the cereal box. All is well.

It looks like James got a prediction right – the emergence of civil unrest in America. The feds are talking about the shootings in Las Vegas as part of a wider trend that is more worrisome than jihadism.

What would the ancient Greeks or Romans think about giving out awards to big fat kids just for participating in a competition rather than winning, i.e., “Participation Awards”?

I once saw a big fat Chinese kid in a Boy Scout uniform in Hong Kong licking a triple scoop pink ice cream cone being pulling along by his mommie. I wanted to shout at the little F…cker to get down “…and give me 20!”

The MSN Money site [look it up; I don’t know how to do linky stuff] carries an article titled “High Oil Prices are Here to Stay”.

The article quotes one Bill Thomas, the CEO and Chairman of EOG Resources – a big time oil driller, “the horizontal oil boom is coming from only two plays: Bakken and Eagle Ford”. When asked what the next big horizontal oil play would be, Thomas replied, “there isn’t going to be one”.

The article continues, “the growth of [horizontal] production both by rate and by absolute amount appears to have peaked.”

MSN is a main-stream news source (NBC) and this fellow, Thomas, is as button-down and corporate as they get. When guys like this start sounding like Richard Heinberg you can bet the you-know-what is about to hit the you-know where!

the commenters are interesting with an overall tone of anger and cynicism.

one said the costs of getting it out of ground is not a factor because its same as vertical. jhk has already brought out the heavy costs of drilling shale complete with interviews. its assumed the major drillers have not resorted to pumping the ground with water or nat. gas in order to raise the oil to the top making it easier to tap.

texas announced they slap on 20cent tax to every gal of gas sold to us. while sams and walmart offer discounts to their shoppers at their gas stations. i think its 5%. so after deducting tax, gas is actually 3.20 – 3.30 a gal right now.

referring to jhk recent podcast about dubai megalomania…tx a&m has very close ties with the ruling elite, educating them with liberal arts degrees on a college campus in that country. most of the administration and teachers over their are from usa and living as described in the podcast.

“Figure for worst-case (human asshole-wise). That’s the most pragmatic default position from my experience. How about yours?”-Oz.

When factoring in the human element, I think of the three dumbest possibilities and jot them down somewhere. Then I take a deep breath or a short break, I look at them again and pick the dumbest of the three… That’s usually the one to spend the most prep-time on.

So, if I apply that technique to the scenario we’ve been discussing, we’re all seriously fuh-kacked.

Planning as if the worst of worst-case scenarios is the likeliest, means that first events will do 80% of the damage – not unlike the first 30-seconds of an ambush.

In that case, stay flexible, recover quickly, and be prepared to re-position.

Right now, nothing is what it seems, reliable information is scarce. We don’t know exactly what’s coming because we have a very sketchy idea of where we are.

Folks are not sharing information, either to protect themselves or to prevent panic. We (not just us, but stakeholder organizations too) lack sufficient data.

We have to invest in resilience; avoid isolation, reach out and engage where possible, keep our options open when possible, maintain reserves.

Back to J H K’s work for a ‘tic: The ‘Union Grove’ scenario is something that happens after most of the nastiness is over. It’s been called ‘dystopian’, but in comparison to some likelier scenarios, it starts to seem idyllic, doesn’t it?

MD, you sez:
“Right now, nothing is what it seems, reliable information is scarce. We don’t know exactly what’s coming because we have a very sketchy idea of where we are.

Folks are not sharing information, either to protect themselves or to prevent panic. We (not just us, but stakeholder organizations too) lack sufficient data.”

This is a large sticking point that should be carefully pondered. There’s a squelching of reality-based, ‘useful’ information and a loud broadcasting of delusional nonsense. Sorting through and reading between the lines is becoming a critical skill in this age of newspeak and obfuscation. “…Lies; damn lies, and statistics…”

“We have to invest in resilience; avoid isolation, reach out and engage where possible, keep our options open when possible, maintain reserves.”

Good advice in all interactions (except, most unfortunately, the intertubian, where watchers are busy destroying trust; ain’t got that and you ain’t got shit as we’ve noted a’fore).

“Back to J H K’s work for a ‘tic: The ‘Union Grove’ scenario is something that happens after most of the nastiness is over. It’s been called ‘dystopian’, but in comparison to some likelier scenarios, it starts to seem idyllic, doesn’t it?”

I’d agree, and yes, he does infer internecine nastiness betwixt “the regions”, of which there will be a wagonload of as people search for well-watered arable land or something to steal. (We’ve already seen the evidence of the direction that “law enforcement” is taking. Being that they’re being handed military weapons and machinery, they will probably form the most dangerous of the reaver gangs and may have to be countered by more tactically astute combat veterans on known ground. Messy and vicious, methinks.) We can only hope things settle down to ‘Union Grove’ status after the welter of killings/death by pestilence is completed and a tentative trust and co-operation must be approached in order to carry on the species.

What role does the media play in creating mass delusions, for example, the delusion of economic recovery? What mass delusions are peculiar to America society? Are minority persecution complexes a mass delusion?

What form of popular mass American behaviour these days is NOT delusional?

“The DSM-IV, and psychologists, generally agree that personal beliefs should be evaluated with great respect to cultural and religious differences, since some cultures have widely accepted beliefs that may be considered delusional in other cultures.”

My wife calls a mass delusion “folie à plusieurs.” She should know; she’s a psychologist. We seem to be suffering from a bunch of them. As for the media’s role, JHK himself pointed it out in “The End of Suburbia,” where he called the condition it created “the consensus trance.” The late Joe Bageant had a name for the media apparatus that produced it, “The Hologram.” It turns out that before Joe died, he and JHK were passing along these ideas to each other. I documented that exchange in my obituary post for Bageant three years ago.

For some reason I don’t believe the WSJ editorial staff caught last week’s “Buffalo Blahg” posting. Here’s what Marketwatch (, published by WSJ parent Dow Jones & Co.,) had to say today

June 16, 2014, 1:15 PM ET
Buffalo’s housing market is looking a lot like San Francisco’s

With real estate bidding wars and a low number of homes on the market driving prices higher, Buffalo is more similar to San Francisco than many would’ve guessed.

According to a recent story in the Buffalo News, it’s become common in hot sections of the city for sellers to receive more than their original list price as bidding wars push prices higher.

“The pace is intense, with even a day’s hesitation making the difference between a signed deal and a missed opportunity,” the story said.

The Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors recently reported that the average sales price jumped up almost 8% over the past year, while the inventory of homes available for sale dropped almost 12%.

Buffalo’s experience echoes other metro markets across the U.S. as buyers run up against a relatively low supply of homes for sale. According to real-estate firm Redfin, white-hot markets such as San Francisco and San Jose saw almost 70% of homes recently sell above their list price.

But bidding wars may be where Buffalo’s similarity to super-hot metros ends. According to the Buffalo area Realtor group, the local average sales price hit about $144,000 in April, while the median price reached $117,000. In San Francisco, the median sales price recently hit $920,000, according to Redfin.

Housing inventory in markets across the U.S. is low for a variety of reasons. Some sellers are keeping their homes off the market, biding their time until prices rise. Others, who don’t have enough equity, simply can’t afford to sell their home and pay closing costs. And then there are the owners who refinanced into an ultra-cheap mortgage over the last couple of years and are now reluctant to give up their inexpensive loans.

JHK – somebody is going to have to do some work on your comments, as jmar98 suggests.

Why not have the comments all post to a single page, while they are making changes anyway.

Thanks for the week’s work, btw.

And what you reported around Detroit is part of the “creative destruction” that is supposed to be necessary for capitalism to function properly. Creative destruction makes for a nice sounding theory – but it’s not that nice when its peoples lives that are being destroyed, in addition to their capital, is it?

since so many of you tend to introduce irrevelent comments to this weeks blog entry…

nesting makes it easier for everyone to see, read, ignore or comment to all 300+ NEW threads on one page. webpages do not have to be only vertical growth, you can grow horizontal at same time…like a tree with one root.

nesting does not allow trolls and hypercommenters to hijack the conversations already started by pushing them off into archive heaven.

also, this is a public forum dedicated to ideas. its not appropriate to get too familiar with each other or jhk like we are actual neighbors passing on street. if you want to direct a message to one person, nest and or obtain their email somehow…ha!

Oh yeah, baby praise Jesus!</b? And if he were there he'd be so busy washing feet He'd not have time to watch a match.

So, why contrahend lives in a mud hut in Brazil is now known. As well as the reason why he can't afford spiffier digs. And being perpetually stuck in a cornucopian disneyland? He may not be paid to have a terminal case of the happies after all. It could be neurosyphilis.

Turns out these thousands of youngsters from Central America showing up at the border are not all innocent kids, no, some of these ‘youths’, a good percentage, are 16-25 year old gang bangers and criminals. Coming soon to a street near you? Is the day far off when you get a knock at the door its an agent from the Ministry of New Americans you have a nice big place here, many rooms and much acreage, you are hereby ordered to room and board an even dozen migrants after all you have all this xtra space, a nice car, let me see what’s in the fridge by the way, any tacos? Lose that white bread, here they are right out in the white van on the curb? No, well of course you’re some sort of nativists and racists we’ll just take your whole gaddam place and move 50 of ’em in. What are you gonna do about it?

Hey, somebody tell the esteemed president when he was yukking it up with the UCONN basketball teams in the White House Mosul, Iraq’s 2nd largest city, was falling to al Qaeda. Bagdad’s next.

BRH,
If things should come to that turn, expect resistance to The Ministry… and more. (There are only so many well-indoctrinated people you can expect to meekly absorb outrage after outrage.)

ISIS is also busying itself with taking the oil fields as well. They’ve driven much of the commandeered equipment back across the Syrian border to add to their stockpiles… while the idiots in charge of our country’s foreign*cough*policies ship ’em some more.

Heckuva job, Georgey, Obama, and the rest of the raft of megalomaniacal fuckwits we’ve been saddled with. Is there any wonder that our cityscapes have become massive clusterfucks of their very own with profiteers in control of everything?

Howdy O3, I also ask the question as to where are the promised high mileage cars. I traveled the USA for a year in 1977 in a FULL-SIZE 1972 Ford Econoline E-150 decked out as a Camper and filled with gear. A 240 CI straight 6 single barrel 3 on-the-tree and would get 28 MPG all day long. Everything today is about horsepower. I probably had about 95 HP. You can’t get a full-sized van with a 6 anymore. I don’t know if you can get a standard tranny .Everybody wants to do 80 mph uphill. Mine was a little wheezy in the Rockies but I actually got to enjoy the scenery. A friend has a newer Econoline and gets maybe 16 MPG. Same size truck. You only have to watch the boobtube and see the ads for the horsepower wars. No higher-ups are really concerned about fuel conservation.

RT,
Yeah, where went all those 60mpg improvements to the internal combustion in-jine? Do you suspect collusion to guzzle petroleum distillates for the sake of profit?
Could we possibly have been craftily lied to?? Horrors.
😉
(Faster ain’t always better, and an old IH 6-wheel dump only has a 253 in it, I think. It can haul a lot of material without any problem, if not worried about ‘fast’. Pretty? Comfy? No, but job specific with nary a computer to be found.)

I enjoyed the “World Made by Hand” series so far and look forward to the next installment. My teenage daughter filched my copy of the Witch of Hebron and read it, unbeknownst to me. She did not like “Billy Bones”, not one bit, but rest assured, she is otherwise untraumatized.

Trade by water: as long as things don’t deteriorate past the point of no return, it seems a plausible scenario. And not just in the Great Lakes. Someone mentioned the Native American canoe trade. Their networks spanned thousands of miles. In Cahokia, for example, they have found Great Lakes copper, Yellowstone Obsidian, Gulf Coast shells, and so on. Then there were the Voyageurs. The Lakes and navigable rivers may well become the highways of the future.

I suspect the journey between here (Industrial Civ.) and there (World Made by Hand) will be what is truly nasty.

You can always spot a Republican. They could walk into the Garden of Eden and they would still say,”How can I make this place better?” Their second thought would be, “How can I make Adam and Eve better?” But without a doubt their last thought would be,”How can I make myself better?” One example that comes to mind is the conservative cigarette smoker, of which there are many. “I’m not hurting anybody else,” they think, while spewing their poisonous, noxious gases for the rest of the world to breathe. Is it any wonder they deny climate change?

no child is purely innocent, they are easily manipulated and suggestable from birth to young adulthood. street kids are a common feature in highly populated cities. americans do not tolerate young people on the streets for obvious reasons like we get more money from state/fed for every head in our schools and any other social programs we can conjure up on a grant request form. countries who cannot tax their citizens like we and other wealthy states do rely on churches, military conscription and the overall hood to oversee their general welfare. if they get involved with drugs or gangs they will kill themselves off…end of problem.

Methane Hydrates will only add to Global climate change. Sure we’ll have energy ( if this pipe-dream is true) but what about when future generations are inundated by rising ocean levels? Yes the Earths climate always changes, but certainly not at the rapid rates which are being recorded in the past 100 years since the fossil fuel fired up modern civilization.

the “hysteria” is coming from the only segment of society concerned about “future generations”. the rest are only concerned about their immediate gratification. i reference kunstlers brilliant rolingstone article reinvigorating the discussion about the current energy predicament and introducing many people to peak oil. it started in the seventies and the decisions made then were not in everyones best interest and we are now experiencing the longterm effects of those decisions, paralyzing the leadership to the point where our world is experiencing a major upheaval if our children continue the habits to not adjust appropriately.

Expect ‘contrahend’ to come to the conclusion that any rise in sea levels will only increase the surface area of the world’s ocean basins leading to more surface area on which to look for methane clathrates.

So I’m not around and you don’t take your Ritalin, instead bringing the irrationality and insanity of your attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder here. Ignoring the fact that methane clathrates can’t be found anywhere on the planet in deposits rich enough to be economically viable.

And after a forty year search not finding economically viable deposits is significant.

But the total amount in the thin layers where clathrates fill spaces between sand grains is enough upon integrating over all ocean basin surface area on the planet to raise the earth’s temperature by six degrees. All by itself, and it has happened before. Creation of the Siberian taps created conditions for global warming which set the clathrate gun off.

And that six degrees is on top of the six degrees we are already managing by ourselves.

“I’d agree, and yes, he does infer internecine nastiness betwixt “the regions”, of which there will be a wagonload of as people search for well-watered arable land or something to steal.”-Oz. re: J H K.

So, we’ve placed the nuclear-meltdown issue at the top of the list of deal-killing obstacles between us and the (comparatively) idyllic scenario J H K likes to write about.[*]

Next Item: Mass Migration.

There have been comments about preparations (large-scale military/LE joint exercises) aimed at dealing with hordes of “zombies”. ‘Zombies’ are obvious stand-ins for hordes of wide-eyed & unreachable refugees who might as well be (writing from experience).

What would stampede them?

Plausible incidents (other than one or more meltdowns):

How about epidemics?

MERS has made it into CONUS as of last month. It has a proven lethality of over 50%. Currently it’s untreatable. Ebola has made landfall in Europe with a boatload of 40 African immigrants quarantined in a hospital Pisa, Italy. It has a lethality of “90%” and also untreatable. Expect that more infected folk slipped through the cracks and mingling with the gen-pop over there. Since it has an incubation period of “21 days” expect that it’ll be over here, soon enough… Fun times /s.

“Small disasters cause Panic. Panic causes large disasters”… It doesn’t take a lot of actual death and destruction to get people fleeing, pell-mell and killing more of each other in the process, before getting killed-back from the roadblocks.

The knock-on effect of an epidemic-generated mass-migration is the collapse of the health and emergency-services infrastructure (which our oligarchs have been nice enough to reduce to a shambles /s).

This results in a secondary wave of ‘plagues’ of diseases that were nearly wiped-out in the 20th c. but are no longer treatable by existing antibiotics (simply b/c to invest in the R&D necessary wouldn’t have been ‘cost-effective’. another brilliant strategic move /s).

These are at the forefront of foreseeable “die-back” scenarios, I believe.

— — —

[*] I’m disregarding the planting of “hemp and sunflowers” (as much as I may like them) as a useful technique to “fix” radiation-poisoning, b/c you’ll likely be dead before you can plant them… I’m focusing on s/t show-stoppers right now. L/t ‘healing the Earth’ maneuvers are wa-aaay down the priority list.

your risk of being infected by mers or ebola or any other communicable disease depends on your personal habits and what you expose yourself to. we can not control co2 emissions.

Each year, more than 400 Americans die from unintentional CO poisoning, more than 20,000 visit the emergency room and more than 4,000 are hospitalized due to CO poisoning. Fatality is highest among Americans 65 and older. – CDC

Again, no amount of ‘Baghdad Bob’-style ‘everything’s under control, look at all the shiny *technology*’ B-S stops AK-47 bullets.

Both Ebola and MERS have the ability to overwhelm what remains of our malevolently/short-sightedly neglected social safety-net. When people can see other people dropping dead in the streets, the want to GTFO quick.

And of course, starvation is a proven motivator (as a result of commodity speculation, as it was in pre-storming of the Bastille, or in 2010/2011 in the Middle-East or by some other cause)…

As Orlov mentioned in the ‘Five Stages’, the worst thing about being in a “die-back” is knowing that you’re in a “die-back”.

Panic happens when people can’t help but know about it. Chaos takes it from there.

— — —

[*] it’s called a _safety-net_ for a reason. it’s a form of emergency reserve capacity which responsible nations _maintain_ for that very reason.

i did not panic, i was not dying. i am grateful i still had cold running water and a nice breeze.

i really do not know how those fleeing people have lived comfortably in that part of the world even if there is no war going on. i have watched Lawrence of arabia…he got sunburned.
omar shariff is still alive and lives in a condo in egypt. how could he wear black in the desert?

how could they value a ford f150 running on oil from their wells over a camel running on water from their wells?

9/11 aside, i think the average # of people killed due to terrorism is like 8. Lightning strikes are like 30. You don’t see us running around with lightning rods on our heads, but you sure have TSA personnel looking up our orifices.

MD,
“Small disasters cause Panic. Panic causes large disasters”… It doesn’t take a lot of actual death and destruction to get people fleeing, pell-mell and killing more of each other in the process, before getting killed-back from the roadblocks.

The knock-on effect of an epidemic-generated mass-migration is the collapse of the health and emergency-services infrastructure (which our oligarchs have been nice enough to reduce to a shambles /s).
******************

The weighty tome, “The Coming Plague” by Laurie Garret (sp?) put a hyper-awareness of infectious pathogens on me, bigtime. We have all the circumstances necessary for a full-fledged breakout of pandemics staring us in the face and not a muscle twitched to address them.

Migration/flight from pandemic AND ecosystem destruction via overuse or rising sea levels are not to be sneezed at. A real concern for those who would like some of their kith and kin to have a chance at threading the keyhole.

It’s got me thinking about “black swans”; you know ’em, you love ’em. Are they complete blindsides, or are they simply things that the general population is not aware of, but a few observers might be? (I should probably read the book, but preparing for predicaments that are plausible is about all I can do; about the unknowable… not so much.)

I’ve often wondered about the infectious diseases the migrants and refugees might be bringing into the country, diseases long such eradicated in the US, so long ago we don’t think of them anymore. We’ll probably have to start thinking of them again. Before being deployed overseas we got so many shots I felt like a goddm pin cushion. Does anybody eventually screen these people? i understand, in an earlier time, one of the duties on Ellis Island was to check the health of immigrants to protect the population of the US. Is anybody protecting the population of america now? Or just protecting illegals?

“I’ve often wondered about the infectious diseases the migrants and refugees might be bringing into the country, diseases long such eradicated in the US, so long ago we don’t think of them anymore.”-BRH.

+

” Does anybody eventually screen these people?”-BRH.

J H K strongly recommended shoring up our border-controls back in 2008, which I strongly agreed with at the time (and now FWIW).

NOT b/c I’m anti-immigrant (I know too much about both sides of that story). ONLY b/c of the public-safety issue. We couldn’t afford corrupt/poorly-managed border control then, even less now.

From a systemic resilience/survivability standpoint, strong borders and a robust health-care system should’ve been on the short-list of non-negotiable items – if ‘we’ had wanted to get through the next 20 years as a cohesive nation-state.

there was reporter on fox news tonight (i rarely watch it but all my friends do) having a nervous breakdown reporting from the texas border for a few days. doesn’t he read the papers for the past ten years. ain’t nothin’ new.

methane clathrates can’t be found anywhere on the planet in deposits rich enough to be economically viable.

well you’ve shown us before that solar energy is “not a resource”, to use your words, so don’t expect anyone to take you seriously on your newest earth shattering announcement.

you conveniently ignore what I originally posted:

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced today the completion of a successful, unprecedented test of technology in the North Slope of Alaska that was able to safely extract a steady flow of natural gas from methane hydrates

this is how it starts – identify a new energy resource, develop technology to tap it. the point is that we have thousands of times more energy in methane hydrates than we ever did in other fossil fuels. This energy source will be tapped due to economic and supply pressures.

Speaking of Migrants and Refugees, right now at this moment 500,000 Iraqis are on the road with nothing but the clothes on their backs, fleeing Mosul. One reason is these Al Qaeda militias seem to be cutting off heads with their swords and leaving the bodies to lie in the streets.That would inspire anybody to clear out.

This is up north in the oil producing areas, which will probably be lost. JHK usually writes about domestic issues but I’d like to see his take on events in Iraq as well as Syria, which most certainly are related.

Why all the posts today? another day of rain, only sporadically can go out and split firewood.

Reminds one of Vietnam: we spent so much money training those Iraqi troops and they are just folding like paper. The same will happen when we leave Afghanistan. They have no morale – their people have chosen another path and they just want to save their necks once we go.

Imagine if all the money we spent in these useless wars was used to rebuild America. What a stupendous waste.

No I’m quite serious, it is you who jest. That or you are a diabolical chunk of dung.

It has never has started that way ever. Progress is evolutionary and almost never the result of deliberate endeavour. Technology to do so must exist before any energy source can be exploited and new technologies do not come about because we ‘look’ for them. They come about because previous discoveries are adapted to meet new demands necessity being the mother of invention. Rarely is there something new under the sun.

No matter how hard you wish it to be so never can technology violate the physical and mathematical laws of the universe. Further in America technology can’t violate the ‘laws’ of capitalism or it is not useful.

NOTE: Not I won’t be bothering to engage people who think that stuff happening overseas only effects people overseas. That is quantifiably, qualifiably untrue at this juncture.What happens now impacts the timing of every other event ‘downstream’.

Check out Google Glass – and remember it’s just in its infancy. Soon they’ll be able to tie into face recognition tech that identifies each person by name – and you’ll be able to check them out on facebook, etc to see their kinks (you) and racial prejudices (me). Tremble for the hour of judgment is nigh upon us!

Real Americans are tired of alien immigrants – their violence, stupidity, their welfare mentality, their noisy numerous kids – all jabbering in some subhuman patois. Mexicans and Central Americans have all of these characteristics. Thus they are now called Squat Monsters on many sites – a reference to their grotesque physiognomy.

Eric Cantor defended the invasion of America by these beings. He’s been put out. A good beginning. Now the rest of them have to go.

“Real Americans are tired of alien immigrants – their violence, stupidity, their welfare mentality, their noisy numerous kids – all jabbering in some subhuman patois.”-Janos.

Many of the same things were said about German and Irish immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries (Benjamin Franklin detested the German immigrants).[*]

Look what model citizens they turned into.

Cheers!

— — —

[*] “why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their languages and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?”-Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind…”, B. Franklin.

You know I hope that what you just provided is not a logical argument much less a proof? The Australian Aborigines show no signs of fitting in even after two hundred years. The ones who can and choose to do so are the ones with lots of White blood.

The Irish and the Germans were very close to the English in Culture and Genotype when compared with Blacks or Indians. Our current invaders are mostly Indian.

From another angle, saying that all groups will fit in just because previous groups fit it is much like techno-triumphalism and a faith in Progress.

From another angle, even if later groups were White and eager to fit in, they wouldn’t fit in as well because there is less room and opportunity now. Later is not the same as earlier. A full grown organism has different needs and capacities than a growing one. And a Nation is Organism is many ways, is it not?

“The Australian Aborigines show no signs of fitting in even after two hundred years. ”

At least the Australian Aborigines were managing to fit into their ecological niche with a minuscule ecological footprint before all those Europeans came over and messed things up.

They should have closed the borders to European immigrants 200 hundred years ago… I doubt they be exporting coal to China today and if they had and that Great Barrier Reef might still be healthy and productive!.

Cheers, mate!

P.S. maybe the European survivors will get a new appreciation for the Aboriginal ‘Walkabout’ once their SUVs (Stupid Usless Vehicles) start to run out of gas… >;-)

“From a systemic resilience/survivability standpoint, strong borders and a robust health-care system should’ve been on the short-list of non-negotiable items – if ‘we’ had wanted to get through the next 20 years as a cohesive nation-state” – mister darling –

DONG! DONG!! DONG!!!

Somebody ring the gong of truth for MD!

Add to this, the fact that an increasing US population causes a greater and greater impact on global ecosystems. Immigration into the United States should be at “replacement level” for the foreseeable future. These folks can help:

This will not make homes where I live affordable. It destroys ‘transparency’ and the ability of the housing markets to perform the chief function of ‘price discovery.’” But it is taken now as a law of the Universe that all we need is more ‘job creators’ and it will all be good. So come on in. America has plenty of room for more 1%ers who’d care to come over and put the ‘hyper’ into inflation.

It is sort of like Wall Street shenanigans:

Kunstler says Wall Street, “…turned to rackets based on getting something for nothing,” explaining that this, “…coincided with the computer revolution, which enabled financial folk to make their operations incomprehensibly complex and abstruse, destroying ‘transparency’ and the ability of markets to perform their chief function of ‘price discovery.’”

Had we had such programs half a century ago the Third Reich Brass would not have needed to slip away to South America. They could have just come here instead. America, where money and nothing else matters.

Fascinating, makes me wish I was one of those scientists. Imagine, you are among the defeated and receive orders.
“On orders of Military Government you are to report with your family and baggage as much as you can carry tomorrow noon at 1300 hours (Friday, 22 June 1945) at the town square in Bitterfeld. There is no need to bring winter clothing. Easily carried possessions, such as family documents, jewelry, and the like should be taken along. You will be transported by motor vehicle to the nearest railway station. From there you will travel on to the West. Please tell the bearer of this letter how large your family is.”

Upon arrival in the west you will be sentenced to live in one of these model homes.

The Levittowner
The Rancher
The Jubilee
The Country Clubber
The Pennsylvanian
The Colonial

You will be issued a car chosen from this list.

A Buick
A Ford
A Rambler
A Chevy
A Cadillac

You will be expected to work forty hours a week and will be awarded health insurance, you will be given enough money to pay for the house and car. Sufficient money shall be left over after paying for the house and car to live well.

If you have any better explanation and think his irony is not all about the money I’d like to know. My first link shows the Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate. The second makes a case for a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage.

Obama the deportionist is mostly window dressing. Of course the Mexicans hate him because he hasn’t delivered the Southwest into their hands yet.

Nations are formed from a common culture and genotype. To the extent that is attenuated, to that extent the Nation begins to sicken and die. Surely you don’t believe that Negroes have anything to offer a real homogenous Nation like Japan? And if not them, not us either. People come to the wrong conclusions saying that since we assimilated the Italians and the Slavs, we can assimilate Black Africans and Mexicans. It was very hard for us to assimilate those European groups and even the Irish because of historical and cultural reasons. And that was when we are strong. Now when we are weak, people expect us to assimilate far more alien peoples?

“I must conclude he is an closet elitist who judges people by their bank accounts not their character and has been foisted on America by the powers that be.”-K Dog.

I agree. I’m certainly not an Obama-phile – he leaves me no room to be.

That he was vetted by ‘TPTB’ [*] and positioned to receive the lion’s share of Wall Street’s campaign-cash in the Summer of 2008 is fact, not idle conjecture. He received more from The Street than McCain, 2:1.

And then – if there was any doubt whose man he was – he halted the campaign and flew back to Washington DC alongside McCain to ‘corral’ enough votes to authorize the TARP program, and thus set the stage for all that followed.

Party politics became irrelevant in September 2008. Anyone still talking as if there were two distinct parties at this very late date, gave up keeping track a long time ago.

Regarding the flood of all-cash buyers fleeing mainland china (and elsewhere, to a lesser extent), they’re living in fool’s paradise…

“nesting does not allow trolls and hypercommenters to hijack the conversations already started by pushing them off into archive heaven.” – “karah” –

There would not be an “archive heaven” if JHK would disable the pagination of comments. My guess is that that’s an automatic/default function of this blog software. While JHK’s tech guy is fixing the broken link to “older comments” – that would be a very good time to disable this default setting and stop the pagination. That’s why I mentioned it – someone’s bound to be writing to JHK concerning the broken links. Two birds with one stone, and all that.

And, as I indicated, I see a purpose for nested comments. I will use them for corrections to my own posts, for example. And if I ever want to say something to a commenter that’s of ZERO interest to any other readers, then I will nest.the comment. But that’s about it.

On a similar note, if anyone wants me to see a response they have made to one of my posts – they need to put it at the bottom of the thread. Otherwise I’m not going to go looking for responses to my posts. Call it lack of vanity, or something, on my part.

“also, this is a public forum dedicated to ideas. its not appropriate to get too familiar with each other or jhk like we are actual neighbors passing on street. if you want to direct a message to one person, nest and or obtain their email somehow…ha!” – karah ha –

Here I disagree. And the idea that one could get too “familiar” with JHK on his own goddam’ blog’ – that’s a little moronic, IMO.

Look, the internet is going to fail and/or be turned off someday soon. We should set up a system of ravens to keep this important dialogue going. The quality would probably improve – after all someone wouldn’t waste the bird hours just to send a note thousands of miles just to say for example, “Ozone, you are a shit.”

yep, example of getting too personal with ozone…unless you know him in person and can verify his overall personality.

progress4what, you do not use your real name, why should i take anything you say seriously?

if you want your anonymity, just write to him directly! he invites you to do that, why address him here when he more than likely will not reply or dismiss your thought all together. its funny to read but gawd!

Well remember, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Ozone hates me but I fully expect him to have a St Paul moment and realize that I am one with the Light. He has sewn the dragon seeds of hate and he will be consumed when they sprout. Like a good farmer, I merely have to wait.

Just bought a swing blade my unruly front lawn. How is this different than a sling blade? In one movie, the killer used a sling blade but I’m not sure what its actual use is or how it differs from what I have. I remember it looking different.

The ‘Knockout Game’ (remember that?) lives, yes! Over in New Britain, an industrial city that no longer has any industry but plenty of everything else, all bad. But there’s a twist, a variation on the theme. The victims are still white, in this case elderly Polish ladies coming out of the Catholic Church. Here’s where it gets good; the assailants are members of a black girl gang who have taken up the sport of ‘Polar Bear Hunting’, cold cocking these unsuspecting ladies from behind and recording them with their cellphones as they lay on the ground bleeding. Great Fun!!! Yes sir Great Fun!!

Homeless man shot in Hartford, another shot in New Haven. Both shot in the chest not in the head, which is some sort of crazy coincidence. Does that fact have any significance? Don’t know.

This is how it is now in this rich multi cultural mosaic, New England, where we ‘celebrate diversity’ every day, every single day.

You are slowly becoming a White Nationalist. We all have our own journey and process. Yours is just a slow, reluctant one. I had the example of my Dad to fall back on and I embraced the Truth with joy after years of trying to love the unloveable.

Many Black Women have nearly as much testosterone as the average White Man. Black girl gangs in the big cities are far more common than commonly known. They are dangerous people and not to be given any quarter just because they are “ladies”. Remember that when Black Bear season opens up.

In certain circles just commenting truthfully on these events is considered racist and thereby forbidden. Another school of thought says it is our duty to absorb any blows coming our way to make up for past transgressions, even elderly Polish women coming out of church. I personally don’t subscribe to either theory. The depravity in the hood I hear about every day on the news fits in with JHKs theme of societal collapse; no way these things would happen in a healthy body politic.

Look, do you have one of those red checkered hunting caps or don’t you? You better get one if you don’t. Don’t wait hoping that the wind will blow one on your head like Elmer Fudd. Take evolution into your own hands. And we evolve in groups, these groups being races, nations, families, and friends.

I’ve got an Elmerhat! In my small quiet neighborhood somebody tagged all the streetside postal boxes and our granite hitching posts ( yea there still there) with some weird emblem in pink paint. I didn’t know what it meant but a friend from CT. told me it was a girl-gang emblem. Why the PO doesn’t repaint the boxes is beyond me. My buddy says if you remove the mark retribution will be delved out. Screw them.

No I’m quite serious, it is you who jest. That or you are a diabolical chunk of dung.

Well, thanks for finally clarifying that, I knew I could count on you to provide something of substance. Your language reflects the level of your thinking ability.

In other news, Japan is targeting 2018 to use methane hydrates to reduce its reliance on LNG imports. The first successful steady-flow test to tap methane hydrates already took place in 2012. The resulting natural gas flowed for 30 days consecutively.

We will follow this folly by Japan, the US and other countries to tap a non-resource that has no economic viability and is only found in scattered concentrations and will never, ever be used to power modernity.

Until it inevitably does.

The old saying…first they laughed, then they sneered, then they spewed hate…then they accepted progress.

It is unending fun to show up the naysayers on this board with real-world successes.

We salute those who doubt as we soar high above you into a world of superabundance and energy ascent.

As if dung was demonic! Dung is the basis of everything. Farmers need animals to manure their fields. Cow Dung can be even used as fuel when dry! Has anyone here tried this? How bad or good is the smell of burning diabolical dung? I wish the internet had an olfactory channel. There may be no need for us to freeze to death if we can heat with our own shit. But we might have to eat like the cows do, perhaps?

Hey, I know… whoever can take and hold the oil fields ought to be the ones that we shower largess upon! (Lookin’ distinctly Kurd-ified, and Whey too.) Wha’dih’ya think? Them Eye-rockeez are sittin’ on a buttload of American SUV-juice ya know.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

I watched the documentary recently (Netflix). The trailer has part of what I want to point out. In it there is a ‘suspension bridge’ graph which maps inequality. That same shape also describes the level of political harmony in America. The peaks indicate a surge in political discord. The low part, harmony. It is not a coincidence that the graphs are the same. As we become more unequal as a society we also become more politically polarized. The two correlate and the only way to reverse political polarization is to reverse inequality.

Ah! Very handy. As with any black market operation, reputation, reliability and quality control are paramount for success and continued prosperity (unlike the ‘free’ and ‘open’ market, designed by and for mendacious profiteers).
We just have to find the right purveyor and it’s, “Forward into catatonia!” 😉

Any volunteers for testing the procedure’s efficacy? There’ll be ice creeeam……

Contra, I’m giving this one to you. Tail between my legs I sulk away in defeat. Clathrates will bring a glorious future and save the world. A virtuous cycle of accelerating progress will envelop mankind in a blossom of growth. Prosperity will bloom. We shall be as gods. Omnipotent and omniscient we will become omnipresent among the stars of our galaxy. When the grays meet us out among the stars their eyes will glow with wonder and admiration. Impressed at our magnificence they will listen to our music. We shall be as gods, immortal and eternal as we emerge from a warm cocoon of sweet progress and morph into a single dazzling spark. A spark of exploding metamorphosis as the Kurtwellian promise of glittering singularity is realized.

So your work here is done and now you must move on. I wish you well. You have shown us that our dung smells good and concern for the future is but a mental aberration. Hubris is the way to go, Ayn Rand was a babe, and I have been a fool. With clathrates snatching away the ammo from the clathrate gun and saving the world in a cumshot of exploding Kurtwellian splendor invalidating the very concept of clusterfuck certainly you must have better things to do than be here.

“it is so ironic…my great grandfather made a living to feed his 12 kids by drilling all those iraq oil wells.

now evil dictators want to control the wells.”-Karah.

Let’s not kid ourselves K., “evil dictators” *have* been controlling the wells since they were drilled, ‘pro-western’ (ie. BIS) or no.

Speaking of “ironic”, I find it extra-ironic with a side-order of sardonic that Iraq – whose borders were created from three Turkish Empire ‘vilayet’ that corresponded to the modern ethnic boundaries – is devolving back to that very configuration.

Yes, this is the way it was always going to end. There was nary a chance of anything else once we destabilized the unnatural situation. Nary? Well, for the sake of honesty, there’s always a chance. If I fought a 250 pound mixed martial arts champion, he might die of a heart attack as he pummeled me. Or maybe I could break his throat as he was killing me. But realistically, these wouldn’t happen.

Iraq isn’t a viable nation and it should split into three. Why don’t we stay out instead of throwing good money after bad? It wasn’t a total waste: the super rich benefited as they always do. And we the people are weaker and poorer than ever.

Yeah but really it is nary and to be honest saying there is always a chance really isn’t being true. It is just another self deception ploy because the right thing to do is not to fight the 250 pound martial arts champion in the first place.

Sometimes you have to fight the cave creature. That’s why weapons were invented. And trickery. Review the Mahabharata: the Evil ones were too powerful to be defeated without breaking the rules. We (the good guys!) invented the rules and we can break them too if the other side is unworthy of them. Krishna, (the Christ of India) said so. He is the embodiment of Law after all.

I’m reading the road out of Mosul is strewn with headless bodies and burning vehicles. Ponder that for a moment.

But don’t worry about Iraq the UN is looking into it from HQ in New York City and will be issuing a strongly worded report on the matter before the year is out.

Meanwhile, NATO and the great nations of the west are putting together a New Model PC army, no hetero white men need apply, AN ARMY THAT LOOKS LIKE AMERICA!!! Transgender, Gay, female and Illegal Battalions are being mustered and trained as we speak!

The world hasn’t seen anything like this since the Children’s Crusade in the 14th century when they set out for the Levant armed with nothing but innocence and pure hearts. Let’s hope this latest crusade is more successful than that one was.

low-earner situations are a direct result of people having skills that aren’t in demand

And I say bullshit to that. The reality of the situation is that we are brainwashed into thinking it is up to us to supply the skills for the market because skills are an externality to current business practice. Thank you Harvard. Your statement is dangerous as it justifies a demand for a perfect worker without cost to the employer but you admit it is a simplification.

You admit it is a simplification but it is a simplification that hides many sins.

What about those who are smart, perhaps even with dung degrees they could be rapidly trained. No, the truth is the skills demanded of which you speak are esoteric skills and even those with a background that prepares them to pick up the needed esoteric skills as rapidly as humanly possible are ignored. The simplification is a founding tenant of 1%ism. In the American employment market technicians not professionals are desired. Consequently professionals don’t have the ‘right skills’.

And to this I say bullshit.

To say:

low-earner situations are a direct result of people having skills that aren’t in demand

Now, now is the time for Vlad to unleash the Tanks, going forth as a Conqueror and to Conquer. Take mercy on the suffering Orthodox people in Eastern Ukraine and also help the Shia against the bloody Sunni hordes. It might serve as a deterrence and help stabilize the new borders in the region.

Fighting going on in Eastern Ukraine as we speak. Turns out Vlad (as you call him) has provided his allies inside Ukraine with tanks, rocket launchers and AK47s.

Its a shock, isn’t it, to see the world in flames, as it is, when (after 2008) we were promised universal peace, love and understanding, in fact a Nobel Peace Prize was awarded based upon those promises?

In a span of just 66 years, man had gone from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the moon. Forty-five years after that, Detroit–the Arsenal of Democracy–declared the greatest bankruptcy in American history. Two white men walking on the moon, standing on the shoulders of more than 400,000 almost entirely white employees of NASA, are a sharp contrast to the blight of Detroit, which is now 83-percent black.

blacks do not like pocket protectors and slide rulers.
even if they did, it would not have saved detroit.

You’re only fooling yourself if you see the problem as a right-left civics war……

You only see the Dems as the problem. BUT, I say you suffer from blindness in your right eye.

You need to keep in mind that 10 years ago the US started funneling $5 billion to those in the Ukraine who wanted to join the EU (through NGOs) . This started well before Obama.

Have you forgotten South Ossetia?

Was Georgia duped into invading Ossetia by Karl Rove to provoke a counter-attack by Russia?

Karl Rove, Former Deputy Chief of Staff to George W. Bush and Chief Strategist for Bush’s Presidential Campaigns … I can’t believe that the Georgians would have attacked South Ossetia if they were shown surveillance photos of the Russian troops, …

Maybe we could term them, strategic provocations that failed, rather than [the more forgivable] ‘mistakes’.

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
(The best laid schemes of Mice and Men
oft go awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!)
— Robert Burns, To a Mouse (Poem, November, 1785)

“There are people petitioning the U.S. for various forms of visa applications. One of the most notable is the EB-5” or investor visa program, in which Chinese nationals who make an investment of $1 million in a job-creating U.S. enterprise have a shot at permanent residency.

U.S.-China commerce analysts have said that after the U.S. EB-5 program’s Canadian counterpart closed in February, more wealthy Chinese people looking to park their assets in stable climates may soon head south.

so thats why we have three chinese buffets opening up within the space of two years in our little town…

Locals have taken to calling it Hongcouver……1/4 of Vancouver BC population is Chinese. Mostly ChiComs hedging their bet with overseas real estate and assets. Fastest growing job category is white houseboy in the colony to the north……

It is surprising how many are taken in though. At their core perhaps many here want to believe in the American dream and the integrity of business practices so badly they can’t fathom that bullship crap is propagated for no other reason than to make more money for the bonus pools of the affluent. Lies to keep American labor from reorganizing and maintain their edge. It is a coup for the shills to heave their lie at you because the cure of course as soon as they spot a quizzical expression on your face is to tell you opening the borders and employing the poor huddled masses of the world is the solution to their skills problem. That flying in workers will bring prosperity and return growth to America.

And if they can they can bring in an Indian or Chinese national and spend six weeks training them instead of you in only a few months they make up their plane fare and start building up the bonus pool.

The other part of the lie is to actually assert that the contract labor they do fly in have more skills than you do; they don’t.

As to why enablers and apologists, all highly “respectable” and credentialled become such shills when it is not good for America?

If you can see that, you should be able to see how Blacks sabotage themselves. But you can’t. Perhaps you can only see evil when Whites are agents of it. And by your blinkered premise, they can never be the victim of it unless by other Whites.

World might be going up in flames, but learned today next town over, with a population of about 25000, is building a $40 million ‘Sports Complex’, with night lighting and latest amenities, so kids will have a nice place to play soccer, football and lacrosse.

After TSHTF, first thing to be done is reclaim these facking golf courses (half the town) and turn them back into agricultural purposes, what it was to begin with. What a waste they are, golf courses. Another thing is confiscate those goddam Polo Grounds so we have a place to keep our necessary draft animals. Place is right by the river, wide open, so might be used for other purposes too.

These things occurred to me putting around town on my old 1 cylinder motorcycle today, dodging massive SUVs

Enjoy the Enfield while you can. Perhaps you can get it to run on ethanol.? I was up in ME. last week and the ocean is not dead yet. We ate at a dockside restaurant and there were maybe a million small fish swimming in the harbor with stripers jumping and eating the little critters like crazy!

No, the truth is the skills demanded of which you speak are esoteric skills and even those with a background that prepares them to pick up the needed esoteric skills as rapidly as humanly possible are ignored.

this is pure nonsense. esoteric skills by definition are not in demand, are not ‘needed’. if they were, they would be ‘mainstream’ skills.

no, it’s very simple. if you can program a computer, or can understand chemical reactions and work refining petroleum, or have the talent to fix machines, cars etc., you can find decent to really great paying work.

nothing esoteric about it. and not hard to understand.

What about those who are smart, perhaps even with dung degrees they could be rapidly trained.

you don’t rapidly train people to be scientists and engineers and computer programmers – although the last category is a possibility to an extent.

other than that, i find your comment on skills being an externality to business practice funny. what, does a business just churn thru highly-skilled workers, and then rid itself of them?

not my experience over 30 years. businesses will kill to hang on to employees that are highly skilled in key areas. they pay them well because they make lots of money thanks to them.

common sense.

and c’mon, america is brimming with folks with idiotic worthless degrees, it’s one of the country’s major problems – a disconnect from common sense.

K-dog I don’t think the poster in question is “welles”. I remember “welles”, IMO he had a different writing style from this present poster and while “welles” sometimes chided JHK for being too pessimistic, he never ended his posts with taunts. Troll behavior wasn’t welles’s thing. At least that I can remember. Welles didn’t post as often either.

A further blurb about this nonsensical skills mismatch, what ails the workforce isn’t a mismatch of skills with job requirements, it’s a shortage of well paid work for the number of workers that need work and income.

Why the work shortage? In a word: offshoring, though depletion of cheap energy plays a big part. And the shills will say that offshoring is a canard. Which makes me laugh.

In days past (especially in the post war period) millions of immigrants came to the US, both skilled and un-skilled, both educated and not educated. Jobs were plentiful, even the unskilled and semi-literate could get decent paying factory jobs. No more though. Those jobs are in China.

If you had a college degree, even a “useless” liberal arts degree, you were good to go. Companies were hiring and you – the college degree holder – were in demand. Those degrees opened doors. If you were diligent and hard-working you got ahead and made a good living.

But that’s pretty much done. All those jobs disappeared with the deluge of work offshored to China.

I know all this from direct experience. But the re-writers of history – supported by the chorus of touts, shills, charlatans and moutebanks -will insist it wasn’t so, that none of it happened the way old-timers remember.

Because, you see, not only are the old-sters getting batty with age and out of step with this brand new plugged in facebook-twitter world, isn’t it a well known fact that people remember things as being better that what they actually were?

Just wait for it. The bought-and-paid-for “academics” will say, now see here, we have all this “data” and all this “scientific” analysis, all of it scientifically done, that proves it was all a mirage. No, there WEREN’T good-paying, middle class jobs, dads DIDN’T spend their career with one company, dads DIDN’T support their wife and kids on just dad’s income. No, it’s ALL a lie, a dirty, low-down falsehood.

No, you see, all these lies, all are told by malicious fomenters of dissent and discontent, all of them out for their own power and influence.

And they’ll be supported by the grinning-sneering Wall Street and media company pitchmen with their well oiled pitches.

Well said. I lost all respect for Academics long ago. They are whores dancing for their dinner – and the Corporations call the tune. Look how they twisted slavery so only Whites are at fault instead of telling the truth that Blacks, Arabs, and Jews were equally so.

And furthermore Carthage must be destroyed. Academics are losing their much vaunted tenure and being turned into ordinary employees – and it is perfectly appropriate because that’s all they are. How many of them ever say anything controversial anyway? I would hope that the tradition of tenure would continue at private universities (if any continue) however. It has value in a real tradition.

“[1] Why the work shortage? In a word: offshoring, though depletion of cheap energy plays a big part. And the shills will say that offshoring is a canard. Which makes me laugh.

In days past (especially in the post war period) millions of immigrants came to the US, both skilled and un-skilled, both educated and not educated. Jobs were plentiful, even the unskilled and semi-literate could get decent paying factory jobs. No more though. Those jobs are in China.”-volodya

[2] “If you had a college degree, even a “useless” liberal arts degree, you were good to go. Companies were hiring and you – the college degree holder – were in demand. Those degrees opened doors. If you were diligent and hard-working you got ahead and made a good living.”-volodya.

Regarding Item [1]: Paul Craig Roberts has gone ballistic about this whole topic – at length and grandiloquently – and he’s far better qualified than 95% of us CFN-folk, past/present or future…

Regarding Item [2]: The ‘uselessness’ of a liberal arts degree is in the relative. In the hands of someone who wants to launch straight onto a management career-path, it may be. In the hands of someone going into ‘Law Enforcement’? It can be a ticket to a comfortable six-figure salary.

Consider the infamous video of the UC-Davis cop pepper-spraying a row of naïve youngsters in the face, while they were sitting down, unaggressive and unarmed (Fall, 2011).

The salary of the associate professor that led that protest? About $60k/year. And the salary of the police Lt. that did the spraying? $130k+/year.

It all comes down to priorities. The numbers do not lie.

At this end of the collapse curve, no one is paying a premium for investing in human capital that they’re in the process of ‘internally devaluating’. But, there might be a little cash to pay people to keep other people in line while they economically wither on the vine.

I would agree that if you’re pointing fingers as to who’s to blame there were a lot of players in the slave trade. As you say, slaves making the journey to the new world had the fingerprints of black African and Muslim slave traders. Didn’t know that Jews were in on it.

According to one blurb I read, Brazil imported 10 times as many slaves as the US and its predecessor colonies. And slavery existed all over the world. Singling out Americans in particular is a nonsensical twisting of history.

Academics are conformists. They toe the line. “Settled science” they say. Ha!

How many times have we seen science that was supposedly “settled” and beyond dispute get unglued? But only after years and decades and only after the ungluers suffer volleys of insults and serious career and personal hardship.

This has happened so many times that you’d think the academic faculties would know better than to routinely inflict such grief.

Tell me about gravitational acceleration. Does an object falling to the ground accelerate through space because of gravitational pull? Or is the object travelling at a constant velocity through increasingly compressed space?

Yes the Jews were very big players. Their center in the North was Newport, RI. The Temple (Sephardic) is still there I believe. The center in South was in Charleston, SC I believe. If you want more, it’s out there. Read “The Grandees” – same guy wrote “Our Crowd”. And of course Nation of Islam’s “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews”.

This is a cone: it will get bigger and bigger the more you look into. The Jews were the slavers for the Roman Empire and even the Muslims at some points. They had even had a post in Viking Scandinavia to buy slaves taken by the Vikings. So we were involved back then too I’m sad to say. Say what you want about Christianity, but the ethos was against slavery. Sadly we regressed during the Colonial Era and enslaved other peoples, either overtly or covertly.

Oil was going to be cheaper, the world would be ‘flatter’, America’s project ‘worked’ and all would be right again in the global-financialist world.

Actually, there was a problem with that prediction from the beginning: very unsettled human ‘externalities’. I continue to be amazed at the globalists demonstrated inability to comprehend that poor-folk that get dealt-out of the world market, have a way of dealing themselves back in.

And that gives me some small measure of hope actually, b/c apex globalists are not nice people, and they really SUCK at running things.

re | Fatherhood

Well, I am a dad and this is dad’s-day. I am glad to have that, and to be here (shoot! I’m glad to be anywhere). However – being a dad – I have some worries about the future:

Many times per week I find myself in the company of young, very hopeful & upwardly-mobile people. One might think (mainly if one were younger 😉 that this would increase my sense of optimism.

Actually, it does not.

Why? Because of what these youngsters are planning to do with their youth, that’s why. The sole focus of all their plans (when it isn’t ‘sex’ in some form, no qualms there b t w) is to pump up some useless product, convince a richer company than theirs that it has earning potential, unload it into that other companies lap and scurry off to some imagined utopia-of-one future.

Younger people will read this and say: ‘well, duh!” People with more life experience will say something else entirely.

What doesn’t get considered at all is: what is the money going to be worth when the only place to use it are nations in some late stage of collapse, or that are already shlurping down the pipe? This will be partly due their abdication of any responsibility to the system that made their launch possible.

W T F will “all that money!” be worth then?

They really don’t know the answer to that because they don’t get out much.

When Carlos Slim (for example) – arguably one of the richest men in the known universe – has to worry about keeping his security detail from being bought-off by a drug-cartel bent on managing his kidnap, rape and torture – then no amount of money is going to save you… You are frackin’ kidding yourself. I’m not in a position to confirm or deny this (Carlos is a very powerful man and this is not the day for that 😉 but there are scores of other verifiable examples confirming my point.

What the rich have forgotten is that the safest security policy is to be deeply ensconced in a region of the world where hunger is unheard of, and eruptions of deadly violence are rare. But you can’t get there from where we are now *anymore*, thanks to the very people who would have reaped the greatest benefit.

When I consider this I must admit feeling just the _slightest_ bit pessimistic:

if you go to your neighborhood walmart you will probably witness the evolution of man’s desire to dominate man starting with the toy section, to sports, camping and finally hunting. one section of shelves houses boxed “assault weapons”. adjacent to that is the “survival equipment” and before that is the fuelless transport complete with armor and padding and before that is the miniature armed figures that bring to life everything depicted on screen in the adjacent electronics department. who are the “bad guys”? someone has to be bad before someone can be good. according to the nra, they are the good guys who should be sent to handle any bad guys. i do not see them buying tickets for baghdad. i do see young men gawking at the boxes of assault weapons under the illusion that possesing one with the oermission of walmart automatically makes them one of the good guys. well, we have seen almost every day in this country how “good” we can be.

about neo-perochialism…
one company taking care of you from cradle to grave.
walmart has set itself up to be that kind of provider in the retail realm but not in the employment realm.
corporations are not allowed to have company stores circa 1930.
there is too much there that can and will be abused.
its called debt slavery and some companies were still practicing the model in the fifties and i know of one very small family run business that makes almost all its money back spent on wages to its “employees”. sure, its livable but is it correct?

We need to stick to the script here: an unwashed towelhead smoking a hookah pipe while attached to an artificial kidney machine in a cave atop an afghan mountain knocked down some new york shysterscrapers…..

“Thanks to a supine and indolent Congress, and a long quiescent public, President Obama already has all the authority he may think he needs to take the United States into war in Iraq for the third time in three decades.

Remember the AUMF? That’s the Authorization to Use Military Force, passed by Congress in an abdication of its constitutional responsibility on September 14, 2001, giving away its authority to declare war. That self-neutering act was opposed by exactly one member of either house of Congress, California Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat. The primary section of the AUMF bill provides:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” – William Boardman

Okay, William, let’s consider that Barbara Lee’s particular political affiliation has nothing to do with anything (thanks very much).
The holistic image of the rest of the forest is eminently instructive as the swirl gets tighter. (Yes. we all know what that means whether we wish to acknowledge it or not.)
nsa consistently skewers the salient points that fire the flares of the near distant direction in which we happen to maniacally headed (whether we wish to acknowledge them or not).

No need to apologize, MD. I get a bit growly about this subject too. When the (Orwellian-named) Patriot Act was taken down “from the shelf”, I had one response: “Oh boy, here we go; it’s the beginning of the end, and this mindless fratboy in the Oval office is gonna sign off on this shit, just like he’s instructed.”
(Yes, everything has been decidedly ‘tenuous’ since that time. The same horoscopic advice every day, “Don’t sign any contracts today.”)

Buffalo has been like that for decades. In 1979 I was between trains at the (now closed) Paderewski Drive train station. (In those days there was a two or three-hour gap in Buffalo if you happened to be taking the train from Toronto to NYC.) There were no amenities in the station at all, and I was hungry. I left the station in search of a restaurant, or even a grocery store. I found nothing. I walked for about 45 minutes before giving up and going back. The last thing I wanted was to miss my train and be trapped there.

If this indeed happened in 1979, then less than two blocks from the station—literally a three-minute walk—you would have found the declining but still vibrant Broadway-Fillmore district, with innumerable restaurants and other small businesses, at least eight or ten department stores, the city-run Broadway Market with over 100 food stalls and several restaurants, not to mention a neighborhood tavern or restaurant on virtually every corner. You must have walked in the one wrong direction.

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Too Much Magic

Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

The nationally best-selling author of "The Long Emergency" expands on his alarming argument that our oil-addicted, technology-dependent society is on the brink of collapse—that the long emergency has already begun. Published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.